


One-Man Advantage

by PoppyAlexander



Series: Boyfriend Material [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hockey, Background Relationships, Consensual Non-Monogamy, Established Relationship, Established Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Hockey, M/M, Open Relationships, Sequel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-08-22 10:59:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 48,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16596593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoppyAlexander/pseuds/PoppyAlexander
Summary: Sequel to my fic Boyfriend Material. Ice hockey AU.Boston Brawlers goaltender Sherlock Holmes and his teammate, defenseman John Watson, came out as a couple during the national TV broadcast of their team's championship celebrations. John has retired from hockey due to a concussion he had promised himself and his sister would certainly be his last, and must redefine himself and figure out what comes next. Meantime, Sherlock's career appears to be peaking. With the burdens of success weighing on them both, the two attempt to master the long change in their first year as an official couple.





	1. Chapter 1

**PREFACE**

_“Good evening, Brawlers fans, and welcome once again to BSN’s coverage of hockey night in Boston.  I’m Jack Edwards. With me in the booth as always, Andy Brickley; and our rinkside reporter is Molly Hooper. Tonight’s matchup with the visiting Hamilton Thrashers promises to be an exciting one, as the B’s have met the Thrashers twice before this season, each team has one win, and tomorrow’s matinee up in Hamilton for the home-and-home series will be a test of both teams’ stamina and resilience as only eighteen and a half hours will elapse between the start of tonight’s game and first puck drop of tomorrow’s.”_

_“Absolutely, Jack, it’s going to be interesting to see what lineup changes might come given the fatigue factor, especially this late in the season, only three weeks to go in the regular season, and while the Thrashers are pretty much guaranteed their spot in the play-offs, the Brawlers are still looking to secure that wild card slot.”_

_“Tonight’s starting goaltenders brought to you by Wainwright Bank, banking on values. You see the Thrashers’ Jack Pryne is twenty-eight, twenty-two, and seven against the Brawlers, admirable save percentage of just under ninety-one percent; he has a 1.85 goals-against average here in the Boston Garden. And in the net tonight for the Brawlers, the much-anticipated return of Sherlock Holmes after a fourteen-game absence while he recovered from an undisclosed injury.”_

_“Holmes has definitely not had his best season, Jack. Vezina trophy winner last year, Stanley Cup champion goalie, and he came out strong back in October but quickly had a stunning collapse which saw Anthony LoPresti in starting goal quite a bit before the All-Star break, including an impressive seven-game win streak back in early December. Holmes came back and looked more like himself for a while, then came the injury that kept him not just off the ice but out of the building and off the road for close to a month. It will be interesting—to say the least—to see if Holmes can shake off the rust and defend the house, help this Brawlers team to a win against Hamilton tonight.”_

_“Indeed it will be, Brick. We’ll take a break as the Boston Brawlers take the ice, and when we come back, the puck drops against the Hamilton Thrashers.”_

Sherlock had held his box empty that night—rescheduled some charity raffle winners and shifted some others into his teammates’ suites—so that John would have the place to himself. His anxiety, though he tried to hide it, had been palpable and growing in the days since Sherlock had been told he was going to start in Hamilton. They both knew Sherlock was born for it, and he was clear-eyed, clear-headed, his every word and action indicating that despite his long absence, Sherlock refused to miss a beat. He was freshly recovered—as far as he was concerned, better than new—battling back any and all doubts, ignoring the negative chatter that had started as far back as November. He had set his work ethic and hockey-intelligence to their highest levels.

John would by then have ordered a top shelf whisky, and food to be brought out later, only after he was certain Sherlock had settled in. They’d talked the situation up one side and down the other, both of them were as sure as could be that Sherlock would get seamlessly back to work. But Sherlock knew John well enough by now to know he would have to see it to truly believe it.

Standing well ahead of his goal for the anthems, Sherlock played a mental movie of his own highlight reel, reviewed what he knew about the Thrashers offense. Once wide-crouched in front of the cage, he set his jaw and steadied his gaze, thumped the bottom edge of his stick-blade against the roughed-up ice in his crease. He was perfectly at home, hunkered down in those ninety-six cubic feet.

The puck dropped; the game was on. Sherlock tensed and slid slightly toward his stick side, head tilting to keep the puck-carrier in view. Kocur was there to defend him, and Mellon jitterbugged around the shooting lane, pestering the Thrashers’ offense. A furious one-timer rang the post and deflected to the middle; rebound; wrist-shot. . . Sherlock snatched the puck from the air as if it were traveling in slow motion. Save by Holmes.

 

**CHAPTER ONE**

 “Sherlock Holmes and John Watson:  
_What The Hell, Dummy?_ ’s Exclusive Sit-Down with Hockey’s First Out LGBTQ Players”  
posted by: Mags. 11:38a.m., July 2.

 

Well, wow.

Trust me when I tell you Mike and I did NOT expect to be the ones interviewing the now-even-more-famous First Out Gay Couple in a Major Sports League. Honestly, we’re dorky girls with a blog about hockey thighs and playoff beards. Any resemblance to actual sports-journalists is purely coincidental. (As if you hadn’t noticed that 53% or more of our content is gifs from _30 Rock_!) But when Sherlock Holmes’s people contact your people (note: “our people” are Mike and me; we are our own, only people), offering an exclusive interview with a pair of hockey hotties who happen to be hot for each other, you don’t say no. (Incoming gif from _30 Rock_ featuring a crazy YES—we’re taking this story seriously but we’re still us. Watch out, here it comes.)

Phew! Glad we got that one out of the way. Upfront answers to your most burning questions, in case you want to check out early and just get back to the silly stuff:

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were, in fact, the players in our blind item back in the spring.

They said it was OK for us to tell you that.

They are both super nice in person and on the phone.

They are both super handsome in person (and probably also on the phone).

They aren’t engaged or anything. (Mike is mentally planning their wedding attire, despite this, just to be ready in case their relationship status updates)

Did we mention they were nice? _So nice_.

OK, so we edited out the boring stuff like Hi, can you hear me? and introducing ourselves (we interviewed them via conference call). We talked for about forty-five minutes, sometimes about dumb stuff you don’t care about like how we decided to start the blog and hockey-geek stuff you might care about but which is not fun to describe in this format, like who we like for the upcoming season, and why Graham McInearney is the most undervalued center in the league right now.

Without further excuses or explanation, here’s the highlight reel:

Mags: First of all, congratulations on doing something really brave and just generally awesome.

SH: Thank you for saying so.

JW: Thanks. You know it was mostly an accident, though, right? [laughs] Champagne gone to my head after the Cup win.

Mike: Really?

JW: Nah, not really. But it really was spontaneous.

Mike: So Sherlock was surprised when you just said on television, “My boyfriend’s taking me home to meet his family.”

Mags: We say that to each other at least three times a day now.

JW: Do you?

Mags: We’re making a meme happen.

Mike: Not really.

SH: That’s fine. I think that could be quite fun, being a meme.

Mags: I’ll keep at it. Mike, what are you doing for lunch?

Mike: My boyfriend’s taking me home to meet his family. Anyway, if it wasn’t planned for you to come out in a live TV broadcast during Stanley Cup celebrations in the Brawlers’ dressing room—did you have any moment where you regretted it, like, Oh, man, what did I just do?

JW: I think only for however long it took Sherlock to pop his head up and say, “It’s me.” I didn’t regret it at all on my own behalf, but I had a shiver of, Is he going to be OK with this? Because of course, it isn’t my place to publicly out anybody, even my own partner.

SH: Regardless, I didn’t mind at all. I was glad of it.

JW: Other than that, I had nothing to regret. It’s never going to feel natural to me to have my personal life in the public eye, except as it relates to hockey. So after we’re through talking here, I have no future intention to talk publicly about anything personal, at all.

Mags: So if we want to know what you had for lunch. . .?

JW: Ask it now!

SH: We had banh mi from a food truck.

Mike: Nice!

JW: So, look. In the end, I think the important bit of all this, setting aside the shock-horror of coming out the way I did—we did as a couple—is that hopefully, having seen or heard about it, others will feel safer about living a truthful life even in a situation that could feel hostile. It was no risk to me—I’ve made my living, and no one’s going to intimidate or harass me in my place of work. Maybe for someone feeling that coming out is dangerous or even impossible because of the environment they’re in, they’ll look at us coming out together, as pro players of a tough game, in a national league, and feel like they can come out wherever they happen to be.

SH: Or not, as they like.

JW: Of course.

SH: There’s an important delineation between living quietly due to a wish for personal privacy, which is absolutely valid and respectable, and living in silence due to fear of harm. The existence of choice in the matter of how public to be with one’s personal life is incredibly important. People need room to choose. It’s perhaps, I hope, easier to choose to share one’s orientation when one can find evidence that it can be done literally anywhere, with anyone. If we can be queer hockey players and damn the fallout, then maybe someone who’s longed to speak up but worried for the repercussions can find a little inspiration.

JW: Well said.

Mags: I’m curious about how the team reacted, and if their reactions changed from that first night or the few days after, over time.

JW: I think everyone was so involved in celebrating the Cup win, even though chatter went around the room pretty quickly, it wasn’t really top of everyone’s mind. We got some handshakes and pats on the back on break-up day. I got some nice emails and texts.

SH: There was also a lengthy string of dirty jokes and borderline offensive chirping. Which gave me to know we were all fine. I’ve been out to the team for as long as I’ve been playing, so the only real shock for them was learning John is gay.

JW: And that the two of us are together.

Mags: How about around the league?

SH: It’s only been a few weeks, and since school’s out for summer, there’s not a lot of interaction. The league put out a nice statement of support, not for us specifically, of course. But I think it clarified the culture a bit. It’s a been a few years since they started the “Hockey is for Everyone” promotion, and I for one was relieved to learn that when faced with a practical test of its theoretical support for queer people, the league rose to the challenge of walking its talk.

JW: That was gratifying, yeah. And it was the right thing to do. I wouldn’t have expected less.

Mags: So you think that statement was genuine, and not just spin control or covering their butts ‘just in case’?

JW: I can’t speak for anyone’s personal views but now that the league is on the record, personal views have to be secondary when it comes to anything obviously tied to the league, the players, or staff. There are thousands of people employed by the league whose names no one knows; it’s equally about them and how they’re treated at their jobs. Hopefully they feel supported and maybe more secure now that the league has said unequivocally that sex and gender minorities are not going to face discrimination, and that targeting or harassing anyone isn’t going to be tolerated. It was just the right thing to do, as I said.

Mike: It’s hockey, though. It’s a macho culture. It might be even tougher for players to be out in the workplace, when the workplace—the team—is so masculine-centric, as opposed to in some office where the dynamics are more person-to-person, office politics, and so on. Not that LGBT issues don’t come up, of course, but the overt hyper-male stuff in a sports team has to create a different atmosphere.

SH: You’re right, of course. There is a certain air in the dressing room—

JW: Smelling strongly of dirty jocks and dirty socks!

[all laugh]

SH: I was going to say an air of. . .dude. Ly. Ness.

JW: Were you, really?

SH: Not remotely. But the machismo is thick, it’s true. In the end, though, we’re individuals, and we know each other quite well in some ways. The personal relationships, friendships outside of work, and so on, vary like they do in any group of colleagues.  So those who know us well for our personalities and ethics and whatever other qualities are valuable to them, were sort of instantly supportive and then let it go.

JW: More folding it in than letting it go, I think.

SH: True. Yes. New information, but it doesn’t redefine us as human beings, or men on the team.

Mike: Dudes on the team.

JW: That was an astounding moment. That should be the headline. _An Air of Dudeliness_.

Mike: I’ll think about it. But first my boyfriend’s taking me home to meet his family. Can we ask some less serious questions to wrap up?

JW: I’m game.

SH: My life is an open book.

JW: You will pray never to have read it, once you’ve finished.

Mags: Oh, I don’t know. We’re pretty tough.

JW: True enough. Fire away.

Mike: So that’s the word you prefer, boyfriends?

JW: It’s fine, but we usually say, my man.

Mags: Love that. Do you live together?

SH: I forced John to move into my flat by attrition.

JW: That’s not strictly true. I hated my place, and my lease was up, and Sherlock’s place was more comfortable.

SH: And despite what he tells himself, he had no choice. In conclusion, yes, we’re living together.

Mike: Pretty serious then. My man asked me to sign onto his lease and I freaked and told him I can’t because my boyfriend’s taking me home to meet his family.

JW: I’m liking the meme thing.

Mags: What do you do on dates?

SH: [laughs. Laughs more. Laughs forever while Watson clears his throat.] Take him home to meet my family.

JW: Dinner and a movie! If this was one of those know-your-mate quiz shows you’d have lost already. We watch movies and eat together. On the team plane, that’s how we passed the time. Kind of how we got to know each other.

SH: Right. Yes. Dinner and a movie.

JW: You forgot that, did you.

SH: Definitely not. I did not forget.

JW: See how you are?

Mike: OK, last one. Date/Marry/Kill—

JW: Nope!

SH: Kill them all. Take their things.

Mags: Thanks, guys.

Mike: Yeah, thanks.

JW: No worries. I hope you get a million hits and a million-dollar multimedia deal.

Mike: Your lips to the hockey gods’ ears.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot, all the way through Boyfriend Material, and when posting chapter one, to mention that Mike and Mags and their hockey fangirl blog What The Hell, Dummy? are all inspired by a real life pair of hockey fangirls called Chuck and Pants, and their blog, What's Up, Ya Sieve? The blog has not updated since 2016, but it's fun to peruse. They are on instagram and on twitter, both with user name whatsupyasieve.
> 
> OK, so there's that. I've always felt guilty for not mentioning it!

“You’re not reading that again.” John’s gentle scold, through a smile.

“I want to boost the page-views for Mike and Mags.”

“You want to verify how clever you are.”

 _How brilliant_ you _are_ , Sherlock thought automatically. _No risk to you, you’ve already made your living.  Easy to say, but credit yourself your courage, Watson._

John, recently showered, damp-dry and wrapped at the hips in a white towel, paced the room’s angles from marble threshold to cherrywood wardrobe to mahogany footboard. Sherlock lifted his gaze from the tablet’s screen to watch him, half-believed John made redundant trips with the excuse of not knowing his way around Sherlock’s London flat strictly to accommodate his watching. Purposeful or not, Sherlock would take the win.

“Come here.”

“Nope. You’ll make us late for your parents.”

Sherlock sighed extravagant displeasure at being reminded the two were not in London at their leisure, but rather on a working holiday of familial obligation and real estate investment. They were expected at the family home in under ninety minutes; Sherlock was still naked in bed with one leg outside the covers. He flexed his toes. John pinched them in a half-fist on his way to his suitcase, open on the floor.

“If you bend over I’ll have no choice but to ravish you.”

John crouched, dug, shaking his head. “We have a schedule.”

“Why did I even invite you?”

“I’ll grope you in the taxi on the way to meet the estate agent.”

“Oh, yes, now I remember.”

“Get up and get dressed. I can tell already your dad’s not sure about me; let’s not give him the impression I’m one of those people that’s always late.”

“Don’t waste time thinking it matters even the tiniest bit what my family thinks of you,” Sherlock insisted, even as he obeyed John’s command and opened the wardrobe to frown at his clothes. “It’s they who should worry what we think of them.”

There was a tantalising, too-brief display as John unpeeled and tossed his towel, then started to dress. Sherlock licked the roof his mouth. He’d woken John with lips open and roving the pleasingly hairy terrain of his thighs, wandering where he would, until John dug fingers into Sherlock’s hair and laugh-groaned, panting urgent encouragement. _yes—yes—moitié—god yes_. John’s transformation from slack and silent to tense and growling in the course of those few moments was magnificent; Sherlock felt privileged and powerful, bringing him to life.

“That’s easy for you to say, but I’ve only got a few days to make a good impression. I don’t want to leave them with the idea their son’s boyfriend is nowhere near good enough for their precious baby.”

“My mother is clearly enamoured of you already. The only person my father has ever been impressed by is himself.”

John had returned to the bathroom, buttoning his shirt in front of the mirror. “Your brother, though. He’s the one worries me.”

“Don’t. He’s always like that.”

John leaned out of the bathroom, smiling. “Not what I meant. It’s the peer group thing, you know. You and Kim get along so well—too well, I sometimes think—and it would be nice if it were the same with me and Mycroft.”

“It really wouldn’t.”

“For you, maybe. Worried he’ll tell me about how many of your crusty wank-socks he stumbled over when you were a teenager?”

“I used toilet roll; I’m not an animal.”

John gave him a comical, lifted-brow look that said he knew better about Sherlock’s nature. His eyebrows stayed high, but inched toward each other above his nose. “You’re wearing a suit?”

“We’re meeting an estate agent later.”

“But—the garden shed, your mum said?”

“Mm,” Sherlock agreed. “Pity about that.”

John looked down his own front—pastel, watch plaid button-down and narrow jeans—and asked, “Should I change, then?”

“You’re gorgeous.”

“You are.”

Sherlock whisked his phone up off the table beside the bed—antlers and glass, he’d once liked it but now wasn’t so sure—scrolled and tapped to summon a car. “Let’s get it over with,” he said grimly. “If we can get out in time, there’s a shop in the same street as the agent’s office that has authentic Danish pastries and excellent coffee.”

John looked pleased. He was easy to please. Not due to lack of discernment, nor some failure of imagination that made him think anything out of the ordinary was automatically impressive, but only because he seemed, recently, predisposed toward contentment. Sherlock welcomed this happy-go-lucky attitude but would not go so far as to credit its existence to his own. To their partnership, perhaps. Regardless of the root, the bloom was John’s freely-given, frequent smiles, and Sherlock was glad when the sun turned them his way.

 

“Sherlock, dear heart, your father needs you.”

“That’s a first,” Sherlock said, only John in earshot. A bit louder he answered, “Still engaged with the first menial task you issued, Mother.”

“Do you know anything about electronics? He wants to put some documents into the computer.”

Sherlock looked at the ceiling of the garden shed, praying to the Great Nothing Above to have mercy and strike him dead or at least teleport him to an isolated Greek beach rife with hairy-legged, nearly-nude young men. Come to think of it, the latter. John can come; it will be fun. But do hurry.

Reliably, his mother arrived just as things had the potential to turn interesting, creaking back the wooden door with both hands and leaning only fractionally inside. If Sherlock had dressed to avoid manual labour, his mother’s white cotton blouse and crisp gingham pedal-pusher trousers made clear she intended no participation beyond reading out to-do lists and perhaps later pouring tea. Her cress sandwiches were unfailingly boggy and begged for salt, but she did manage to buy all the best biscuits.

“Have you got any Hob Nobs?” Sherlock inquired.

John, wearing one of Mrs Holmes’ pinnies over his summer-hols afternoon-casual, let out a noise indicating piqued interest. He went on sorting washers, screws, tacks, and bolts into empty soup tins.

“Help your father and I’ll go look. Stop in and say hello to Mycroft; he’s in the front room with his tea.”

Sherlock surrendered, asking John, “You’re all right on your own?”

John chucked a small handful of upholstery nails into a tin with a satisfying rattle. “Think I can manage,” he replied, and threw Sherlock a wink.

“You’ve done more than enough, John,” Sherlock’s mother said, uncharacteristically sweet. “Visiting, and Sherlock’s put you to work. . .Put that away and let me get you a cup of tea.” She guided him by the shoulder, though he moved to protest, and Sherlock ducked out lest he give in to his urge to take John by the wrist and pull him out of the shed, the suburbs, indeed the country. A private jet to Thessaloniki could be arranged in under two hours.

“Mycroft.”

“Sherlock. I assume you’ve been ordered to expend a few pleasantries.”

Sherlock snatched two non-Hob Nob digestives off the small plate beside Mycroft’s saucer, bit one in half and brushed falling crumbs off his shirtfront onto the carpet.

“There’s no reason on earth you couldn’t make arrangements for someone to do all these chores they save up for me. A handyman. Weren’t you shagging a migrant labourer last year?”

“He only did commercial work.” Mycroft’s pinched smile belied the familiar glint in his eyes; Sherlock was missed. “In any case, Mother’s afraid without the compulsion of maintaining the family pile, she’d never see you again.”

“I’ve offered to bring them to the states.”

“To put them on a senior-citizen package bus tour with stops at casinos and a far-out-of-town Broadway tryout?”

Sherlock smiled. “You had that idea right at hand.”

“Of course. It was a fjords cruise and a Viking heritage festival, but they’re the same in spirit.”

Sherlock lowered himself into his mother’s twee, too-narrow armchair and pilfered the last of Mycroft’s biscuits.

“Mother’s rather smitten with your companion; you should expect to hear casual mentions of grandchildren in the near future.”

Sherlock grunted a laugh. “John’s a rather good buffer. It’s a relief to have him.”

“Quite serious, I take it.”

Sherlock only gave Mycroft a narrow-eyed glare, unsure of his intention. Mycroft waved him off. “Notable because we’ve never been much privy to that part of your life.”

“You disapprove,” Sherlock accused.

“Not in the least. John seems a solid fellow, affable, clearly without designs on your money nor basking in any reflected glory—”

Sherlock interjected, “Big cock.”

Mycroft pursed his lips once again, more in amusement than disapproval, though to anyone but Sherlock it would have looked prudish.

“How lovely for you,” he crooned, then went on. “I think you’ve made a sound choice.”

“Don’t care what you think.”

“Of course you don’t. Why would you?”

Sherlock became aware of restless noises from the back of the house—inside the cramped study off the kitchen—his father huffing impatiently and shuffling papers, scraping the chair’s feet against the lino.

“I only hope, Sherlock, you’ll allow yourself the luxury of contentment for a change. You do have a nasty habit of self-sabotage.” Mycroft, whose admonishment sounded genuinely concerned for Sherlock’s emotional state, then added in a different, more skeptical tone, “Fear of success, I’ve often heard it called. Though why anyone should fear it is beyond my ability to understand.”

“Five years clean,” Sherlock reminded. “Vezina trophy. Stanley Cup.”

“Yes, both very pretty.”

“Enormous salary. Property in two countries. Non-profit foundation supporting special needs children.”

“All admirable, of course,” Mycroft said, and gave Sherlock a terribly sincere look, even going so far as to lean toward Sherlock as he spoke. “I worry, brother, that you think you don’t deserve it.”

Sherlock slapped his thighs and stood, brushing his palms down his chest to clear away any lingering crumbs.

“Ridiculous.”

Mycroft averted his gaze beneath raised eyebrows, indicating he was backing off the topic.

There came a grumbling, “Blast it all!” from two rooms away, and Sherlock steeled himself, resettling his shoulders from where they’d crept up toward his ears at the sound of his father’s cursing.

Mycroft tapped at his mobile’s screen, and before Sherlock had made even a half-step forward, said loudly, “I’ve summoned my best IT specialist to assist you, Father; he’ll arrive in thirty minutes. Why not have a cup of tea while you wait?” Sherlock allowed himself to smile his relief at Mycroft—well connected, when it suited him—and Mycroft added, “I’ve just finished mine so you’ll be on your own, I’m afraid. Sherlock has an appointment.”

Sherlock did not ask how his brother came to have his calendar. “I do, in fact, and if Mother doesn’t set John loose directly we’ll be late for it.”

As if on cue, there came the rattle of the garden door, John’s trainers squeaking on the kitchen lino, and Mrs Holmes’s high, wittering voice.

“What a help you’ve been, John; I can’t thank you enough.”

“No doubt he’s done twice what I could have, in half the time,” Sherlock volunteered. John had that mechanism which allowed him to pass wasted time at unpleasant tasks for no reason, neither complaining nor feeling put upon, a quality Sherlock lacked and could not say he felt deprived of.

His mother hummed, half as if she were shaming him, half as if she couldn’t be bothered listening to him while she had John nearby to admire—a sentiment Sherlock well understood. In moments Sherlock had stirred up the entire company to the point of bustling them into the entry hall in a swirl; before his mother could register protest, or his father complaint, he and John were striding down the front path away from the house. Mycroft tipped his chin at them as the drivers of two waiting town cars opened doors for them. John looked amused and surprised as Sherlock shoved at his shoulder in a frantic attempt to put him inside the second car.

“What time will we expect you tomorrow?” Mrs Holmes called after them. Sherlock shrugged and lowered himself into the car.

“Perhaps not tomorrow,” was all he said, forcing some false apology into his tone. “Got to run. See you. When.” Another shrug and the driver shut the door.

“What a horrid brat you are,” John marveled. “Your mum is absolutely lovely.”

“If you speak another word about my parents from this moment forward I swear I’ll jump out of this car.”

“You should be ashamed.”

“For oh, so many reasons.” Sherlock leaned forward and passed a business card to the driver. “This address; thank you.”

Sherlock slipped his feet from his loafers, set one ankle on the opposite knee and wriggled his toes. His socks were silk blend, nearly sheer, with reinforced toes and a few thick seams reminiscent of ladies’ stockings. John’s exhalation was audible, and his hand landed possessively on Sherlock’s ankle.

“You’re incredible,” he said, exasperated and impressed. Aroused. Sherlock smirked and looked away, out the window. John’s hand was on the move, fingers and thumb massaging, pressing in hard so as not to tickle. It was as good a way as any to distract him from any more talk of the elder Holmeses, and Sherlock would happily take an ardent foot rub along with his sense of relief.

 

The space was dank and the neighbourhood had attained its peak of hipster chic at least eighteen months prior and quickly slid into decline. Sherlock excused them and the estate agent withdrew far across the room to make a phone call while John and Sherlock huddled.

“Interested?” John murmured.

“It’s fairly revolting and would require three times its price in renovations just to be habitable.”

“So that’s a no.”

“Just keep talking long enough that he doesn’t feel I’ve wasted his time; I suspect he’s holding out for me to raise my budget before he comes across with the good stuff. I’m willing to go another quarter million but he doesn’t need to know that yet. I know he’s the listing agent on that shuttered bank we passed; imagine an oak bar inside the vault.”

“So what should we talk about?” John cleared his throat and changed the angle of his body to give the agent more of his back.

“Don’t know.”

“Shall I tell you what I’ve been thinking about, as regards our handsome young associate over there?”

“I can’t see a reason why not.”

John’s voice roughened as he began, “Can’t take my eyes off his chest, first of all. The only other man I’ve seen wear his tailored shirts that tight, is you.”

“Undo all his buttons,” Sherlock murmured, nodding agreement.

“Pinch his nipples, get my hands on those pecs. I bet he’s smooth all the way down.”

“Undoubtedly.” Sherlock stole a glance; the agent’s back was to them. “The trousers could be cut a little more carefully across his arse. I imagine he looks better undressed.”

It was John’s turn to nod. His gaze was ravenous; Sherlock longed to force his tongue into John’s open mouth, hold his head, push him back and back and—fuck’s sake, the wall was a day’s walk from where they stood. It really was a hideous place. John’s voice snapped Sherlock back to the more imperative, present discussion. “I was thinking—listen—thinking about holding your throat while you suck him off. Touching your face. Guiding you by the hair.”

Sherlock cursed and sucked a too-loud breath, then hid it in a faked cough. He lay his hand on John’s elbow. “Finish ourselves by hand; imagine the mess.”

“Christ,” John muttered, and followed it with a tension-release laugh. “Shouldn’t have started this. Can we go?”

Sherlock squared himself, took a step toward the agent, still on the other side of the room, now swiping his phone rather than talking into it. “Wonder if you’re free to show us a few more later this week? Say, Friday?”

“Sorry,” came the reply, with an apologetic half-smile. “I’m not working next weekend; Thursday to Monday.”

Sherlock held up a finger and turned back to John. In low tones, he quickly explained, “What million-pound estate agent takes a weekend off in the busy season? Only one planning to drink and fuck his way through four days and nights of London Pride.” John tilted his head, allowing that Sherlock’s deduction was likely the correct one. Sherlock straightened up and rubbed his palms together, then reached for the button on his suit jacket. “My partner and I have a proposition for you, in that case, of something we may be able to work out, right now.”


	3. Chapter 3

Mrs Holmes, never one to miss a chance to be both passive and aggressive simultaneously, patted Sherlock’s shoulder and clicked her tongue. “I barely recognise you with that beard. Isn’t it time to shave, now you boys have won all your games?”

“We didn’t win _all_ our games, Mother,” Sherlock grumbled. John cut him off, making peace.

“A lot of players go on wearing their beards for at least part of the summer. I think Sherlock looks quite handsome—like a university professor.”

“Or a football hooligan,” she replied, but her mouth softened from its usual thin line into something vaguely motherly, not quite smiling but with the effort obvious. She aimed her smirk solely at John. “It suits you, John, but the Holmes boys don’t wear whiskers quite so well.”

Sherlock tapped the edge of his fingernail rapidly against the rim of his saucer. When Mrs Holmes turned away from them, John reached out a hand to quiet Sherlock’s fidget.

“Sherlock doesn’t want me to think there are family photos anywhere, but I have to see him in his school uniforms,” John said pleasantly, which made Sherlock kick his shin beneath the table. John mused, “Little bare knees and all.”

“I’ve got two albums in the sitting room,” Sherlock’s mother replied easily. “Wait here. More biscuits?”

“Thank you.”

John turned a triumphant smirk on Sherlock, whose knee jiggled restlessly against John’s.

“I thought you enjoyed receiving fellatio, John,” Sherlock intoned, purposely too loud. “It’s a pity you’re talking yourself out of a chance to ever receive it again.”

John, determined to keep the mood light—no small feat given Sherlock’s equal determination to wallow in his depths of misery—joked back, “From _you_ , maybe.”

Sherlock huffed a breath out his nose. “God, I want to smoke.”

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed the smell of it on you, now you mention it.”

Sherlock had been smoking out the windows of his flat whenever John was in the bathroom, or asleep, then rinsing the smoke from his mouth with cabernet. Apparently not thoroughly enough.

“Just an hour,” John soothed. “Talk me through the photo albums, another cup of tea to appease your mum, and we’ll go. Order in dinner, then a movie in bed?”

“I like the bed part.”

“Despite not wanting to go down on me,” John joked.

“There are other things,” Sherlock replied, a languid flirt in his tone; visits to his family were agonising, but John Watson’s presence made at least a few minutes of each tea-time or workday bearable.

John looked knowing, and contradicted with finality, “You will.” Sherlock’s instinct was to lodge a protest, but now they were talking around the edges of it, his brain was running a highlight reel of various oral encounters, and Sherlock’s mouth had become wet. He swallowed. John winked at him as his mother returned, killing his libido in order to bore and embarrass him with illustrated tales of all his most awkward years.

“Here we are!” Mrs Holmes singsonged. “The other book must be in your father’s room.”

“Which is your room, Mother?” Sherlock asked, even as she spread a plastic-paged photo album open before them. John moved his chair closer to Sherlock’s. Mrs Holmes looked puzzled and sounded annoyed, as if she thought Sherlock was making her the butt of a joke she didn’t quite get.

“Why, the whole house is mine. Do you think your father asserted a single opinion about the wallpaper or the furnishings? What a silly question.” She dismissed Sherlock, inserted herself between them, and turned decisively toward John. “Here, dear. Start with the babies.” She pointed. “That’s Mycroft, aged two. He was very late to walk.”

“Flaming ginger!” John exclaimed.

“They all were. Oh, it was a relief to see them turn brunette. That’s the Scott side coming through.” She lifted her head toward the closed door to the little room off the back of the kitchen. “Eansworth, I’m coming in. I’m showing John the scrapbooks.”

A grumble came back, sounding distinctly like, “What for?” but Mrs Holmes went anyway.

John flipped pages. Mycroft at various small sizes, with two fingers in his mouth more often than not. Soon appeared another infant, wearing hats and rolled in layers of blankets—born in autumn.

“Your other brother,” John said, and Sherlock felt comforted by John’s quiet tone.

“Yes, that’s Enoch,” he confirmed, and took over as page-turner. “The really important bits come later.” He sped through his brothers’ lives without him, but stopped now and then and tapped his finger. “Their first semi-detached house, in Moorehead Street.” “My father loved that Fiat more than any of his sons.” “My grandmother Holmes. She was French, and terribly elegant. The best one of us by far; I adored her.”

Sherlock’s mother deposited a second book, then excused herself upstairs, admonishing them that they must stay for supper, which made Sherlock look heavenward in search of deliverance.

“We’re not staying,” he asserted, once she had gone. The second book featured pictures of the Holmes boys, the elder two school-aged and Sherlock toddling. Sherlock lingered over one photo of the three of them stood in a stiff row in front of the semi-detached house. “My first and only year at the infants’ school. Enoch and I both wished the dinner lady was our mum.”

“Did your brothers go with you and your mum to Finland?” John turned pages and soon enough there appeared photos taken to illustrate significant snowfall: covered cars, half-buried front doors.

“Mycroft was already away at the boarding school he applied to and arranged all on his own; he’ll tell you it was because of his single-minded determination to make something of himself, but the truth is he would have gone anywhere not to be trapped here with my father while we were in Finland. Enoch came with us but foundered. He and my father were bachelors together.”

More pages turned and John said, “God, he looks like you.”

Sherlock hummed. His late brother in his teens was tall and slender, with a sturdy neck and dark hair that waved across his forehead even though he kept it short in an effort to tame it. This far into the photographic record there were fewer and fewer pictures of him, almost none of Mycroft. Finnish landscapes, bunches of strangers who must have been students and friends of Sherlock’s mother. Sherlock, small and serious, forced to pose beside Christmas trees and fence-gates. Medium-sized in his hockey gear, crouched in front of his net. Lanky and beginning to at last resemble himself in his late teens, sprawled on an orange-flowered sofa with a book in one hand.

“Look at you, you little dreamboat,” John teased.

Sherlock grunted. “Chicken legs. Chapped lips.”

“I’d have wanted to snog you in the boys’ toilets; look how pretty.”

“Don’t gild the lily, John. You’ve already won me.”

There were a few more pages, and John scrutinised photo after photo of a much younger Sherlock, smiling mild affection at each image. Sherlock could barely stand to see them. Each picture told its story, background and context clues reminding him this was just after those boys emptied his hockey bag onto the frozen pond and kicked the contents in fifty directions so Sherlock had to scramble, this was the flat with the always-dripping taps that kept him awake nights, that was his dead brother’s jumper that Sherlock wore every day until it unraveled, and even then he couldn’t cry, and it was then he knew it wasn’t just teenage self-absorption that made him think there was something wrong with him. And this was the winter he got hurt, got pills, got hooked. That bruise on the back of his hand was not a hockey injury.

Mercifully, John finished the book and slid it aside. There was cold tea left in Sherlock’s cup. He tilted it on its saucer, watching the liquid shapeshift.

John’s voice was quiet. “Why doesn’t your dad come out?” he wondered, flicking glances toward he closed door at the back of the kitchen. “You’re only here a few days.”

“I’ve been given my orders, and followed them. He’s nothing more to say, and no other use for me,” Sherlock replied, shrugging and lightly rolling his eyes. “Seen and not heard, even after I paid off their mortgage.” Sherlock’s tone was casual if not actually venturing into the realm of joking. John gave his knee a squeeze under the table, and Sherlock ventured, “You’re missing yours.”

John was taken by surprise. “My dad?” He frowned. “A bit. Yeah. Actually I’ve been thinking about my mum, with yours pottering around, making us tea and wiping the worktops every few minutes.”

“She never stops tidying,” Sherlock affirmed. “She’ll die sweeping in some already-clean corner. Your mum was like that?”

John laughed, humourless but wistful. “Not remotely. She read paperbacks on the sofa. Wine in a coffee cup. Sister Kim did the shopping, cooked the meals.”

“Hardly fair,” Sherlock said, with sympathy evident in his tone. He lay his palm over the back of John’s hand, still resting there on his thigh, hidden by the tablecloth.

“Not fair at all, but someone had to.” John let out a sigh. “Still miss her, though.”

“Of course.”

John favoured Sherlock with one of those smiles he had that seemed at once grateful and puzzled, the ever-present, _who are you?_ , in it that Sherlock thought should have faded by now, given he’d laid bare everything he was from the first day they’d met. Funny that John could still be astonished.

John went on staring, smiling, until Sherlock felt a growling low in his belly and had to look away—didn’t look away—couldn’t—finally licked his lips and turned his gaze over one shoulder, toward the front of the house. John exhaled something not unlike a groan, arousal and frustration, a touch of amusement; Sherlock found it a satisfying sound to hear. Coast clear, he fixed fingers and thumb around John’s chin and guided him, meeting him halfway and kissing hotly, as if they would not be forced out of it by the intrusion of one senior citizen or another, sooner than they wished. Sherlock kissed John a fervent promise of more to come, confirmed it with one roaming hand under the edge of the white lace-hemmed tablecloth.

“Hey,” John said, a sudden realization apparent in it. “Your old room?”

“Not a chance.”

“Come on,” John urged. “Just a look.”

“I barely lived here; all my things were in Finland. Long lost.”

“No shrine to the baby son? No shelves full of junior league trophies?” John was insistent; Sherlock tried to distract him with a few well-placed pinches along the inseam of his jeans. John leaned away. “A quick look.”

“Another time,” Sherlock said. The edgy finality in his tone persuaded John to drop the issue.

Mrs Holmes made unnecessary noise, coming back downstairs, and the two gave each other covert knee-squeezes and shared mischievous grins, like kids. Sherlock marveled at the novel situation of one of his men actually inside his family’s house—nevermind that his mother seemed pleased, nor that the man in question had manners enough to insist they stay and finish their tea.

“I think your father wants sausage for supper. I’ve potatoes I can fry,” Mrs Holmes reported, peeking into cupboards and the fridge. “Or would you rather rice?” Her tone indicated she thought rice was a very outré choice indeed, the kind of exotic side dish her wealthy, North American prodigal son must enjoy.

“We can’t stay,” Sherlock told her, lying just enough to spare her feelings. It was John’s good influence that he hadn’t stated plainly that he didn’t want to stay.

“Oh, Sherlock. You’re so seldom home,” Mrs Holmes protested. Immune to her whinges, Sherlock stood firm.

“I’m so seldom in London that when I am, I have many people to see,” Sherlock told her. In fact, just then his in-box was rafters-packed with CRUZR messages from men who’d be all too glad to utterly debase themselves for the chance to see him, though his mother did not need to know he wasn’t referring to reunions with childhood chums—of which he had none in any event, nor cared to.

Mrs Holmes threw a dismayed expression John’s way. To his credit, he only smiled at her apologetically. Accepting it was futile to argue, Sherlock’s mother only rapped two knuckles on the shut door of his father’s little study, and called through it, “Sherlock and John will soon be going; come out and say goodbye.”

Shortly, the patriarch emerged, his cardigan buttoned tight across a rounded middle at odds with the rest of his frame, slender to the point of near-skeletal. Sherlock considered his father’s hands a dire foretelling of his own future—familiarly long fingers covered in too-pink, too-slack skin; knotty knuckles some of which no longer fully straightened; pink-brown spots of variant size and intensity. The future was a horror. Best to stay present, where everything—even the hideous evidence of human decay—was as it should be. Mr Holmes swept one of those crepey hands across his forehead, resettling thin, white hair that hadn’t been out of place to begin with. John rose from his chair, out of automatic respect, and Sherlock reluctantly followed, out of a desire to flee.

“Where are you staying?” Mr Holmes asked, nose wrinkling behind the wire nose-bridge of his spectacles.

“My flat,” Sherlock said. “Same as always.”

“You should sell it,” his father commanded. “Here a week in the summer—carrying that place must cost you a fortune.”

Sherlock’s reply was testy. “Luckily, I have one.”

His father frowned. “Finished those books? They should be put away.”

“I’ll take care of them, Eansworth,” Mrs Holmes dismissed him. “I just thought you’d want to see the boys before they go.”

“Mm.” He offered his right hand to John, who stepped around the table to shake it. “Pleasure to see you again,” he said perfunctorily.

“You, as well. I hope we’ll see you again before we’re off back to Boston.”

“There’s still the front door to paint,” was Mr Holmes’s reply.

“I’ll send someone,” Sherlock said wearily.

Mrs Holmes looked alarmed. “You’ll come again tomorrow, for tea. When do you leave?”

“Thanks very much,” John accepted quickly, before Sherlock could protest. “I don’t mind proper tea and biscuits at all, in a cosy home.”

“Sunday,” Sherlock said, asserting in the single word his adamant need to escape. “We leave Sunday.”

“Back to work Monday?” Mr Holmes asked, his hands resting on the back of a kitchen chair, liver spots aimed threateningly in Sherlock’s direction.

“A holiday, in fact,” Sherlock reported. “Vermont. The Green Mountains. I don’t report to training camp for another three weeks.”

“Another holiday!” his mother exclaimed.

“A holiday, yes,” Sherlock corrected, lest anyone count his weeklong obligation to do his parents’ chores as anything like a relaxing vacation for him.

“My sister and her boyfriend rented a house; we’re staying with them,” John added, trying to smooth things, bless him. Sherlock would be sure to thoroughly, gratefully bless him later. On his knees. Perhaps in the shower.

“That sounds like a bit of fun,” Mrs Holmes cooed. “How nice you’ve got friends you can travel with.” The last of it directed squarely at Sherlock, well known not to have friends of any sort, at all.

Sherlock consulted his wristwatch. “We really must go.” His jaw ached from clenching it; bad news for John. He next looked at his own sturdy, smooth-skinned hands, whose beauty and capacity must not be allowed to go to waste.

A car was summoned, and arrived mercifully soon—thankfully not driven by one of Mrs Holmes’s pensioner friends supplementing her post-retirement income—and John went on being charming and jovial, ingratiating himself even to Sherlock’s father, who deigned to walk with them as far as the foyer. In the end, though, Sherlock’s mother stood alone on the front step, waving them goodbye.

The second they were out of the drive, Sherlock wound down the window and liberated a packet of cigarettes from his satchel, shook one loose and lit it brazenly, while John watched with an expression of mild concern.

“Say nothing,” Sherlock insisted, gripping the butt end between his teeth as he shook out the match and let it go out the corner of the open window.

“I haven’t.”

“Every last one of my buttons has been pressed until it has stuck.”

“I haven’t said anything,” John repeated, holding his hands up in surrender, or as a shield. “I understand about parents; I had my own.”

“No scold about how I should feel lucky to still have some,” Sherlock commanded, and exhaled a blue-grey cloud that quickly dissipated in the breeze. He ashed out the window and let his eyes close.

“No,” John agreed. They went quiet, and Sherlock’s shoulders at last began to melt down nearer where they belonged. He relished two more long, deep drags, holding in the smoke until he no longer could. The latter half of the cigarette went out the window, and he pressed the button to send it back up. The car’s air conditioning was positively arctic; Sherlock’s forearms shivered with gooseflesh.

After a moment, he said wearily, “I appreciate you defending me.”

 “Just doing my job. They got a couple past me.”

“Past me,” Sherlock corrected. “My father thinks I waste money. I probably do. But it’s mine to waste.”

“Yes it is.”

“My mother could have had a much larger life. Speaking of wasting.”

“It’s kind of you to care,” John told him.

“It’s not a kindness. I resent her having settled for making a project of me instead of doing something for herself.”

John pressed his lips together, then said rather softly, “That doesn’t sound like resentment; it sounds like—”

“It’s not guilt,” Sherlock fired back.

John retreated once more. “All right. All right. Anyway, you know I’ve got your back.”

Sherlock felt a different sort of shiver, then. He turned toward John, fixed a gaze on his bright, kind eyes.

“I know,” he said, and he really did. Remarkable. “I’ve got yours, too.”


	4. Chapter 4

John was visibly disappointed in what remained of Sherlock’s childhood bedroom: two narrow beds pressed up against perpendicular walls painted beige, linens and curtains navy blue and bland. No cuddly toy propped against a pillow, no trophies, not even a pin-up of a lusted-after pop star or an admired hockey pro. The one shelf hung between the windows held only a dictionary and two volumes of fairy tales Sherlock had never owned in childhood—mostly likely his mother’s spoils from a car-boot sale, with spines that matched the décor.

The two made themselves useful to the elder Holmeses by moving a pair of small sofas, rotating them so that the firmer cushions of the less-used couch got a turn at being flattened by Sherlock’s mother sitting at one end with her knitting, and his father at the other with his book, while the television showed _Countdown_ or the evening news. They accepted tea and biscuits as payment for their labour, and Sherlock allowed himself to be embraced as they said their goodbyes. Sherlock’s mum spared a hug for John, and Sherlock’s heart panged watching how John closed his eyes at the sensation of being wrapped in any mother’s arms.

Later that night, back in his too-expensive, too-little-lived-in flat, they ordered a heavy meal and put half of it away for later. They drank a sweet, cold torrontes wine, the rims of the glasses carressed with a wedge of lime. Sherlock tossed his few remaining cigarettes in the bin and covered them with plate-scrapings. John walked barefoot across the lofty carpets, and Sherlock caught his hand and drew him toward the bedroom.

“Not my boyhood bedroom, either, I’m afraid,” Sherlock offered apologetically, as they fitted easily into one another’s arms, hands stroking over shirtfronts and reaching into rear pockets.

“I’d had such an eighties-movie vision of it, too,” John said with a stagey, regretful shake of his head.

“Oh?” Sherlock encouraged him, and reached beneath the hem of his t-shirt, hands sliding up along the delicious geography of John’s muscular back.

“Mad snogging in the too-small bed,” John told him, and there followed nuzzling kisses on throats, and nips along summer-stubbled jaws. “Trying to be quiet.”

“Hands under your shirt like this,” Sherlock prompted, digging in his fingers. “Pulling you down on top of me.”

“Grinding against you.” John demonstrated as best he could, the two of them standing too far from Sherlock’s bed to easily fall into it. John’s hands on his arse steadied him, and there was a thrilling threat of losing his balance as John’s pelvis thrust against his own. “Dying to get into your trousers, feel you hard in my hand, so hot.”

“Come _here_ ,” Sherlock urged, and pulled John by the shoulders, until at last he was flat on his back with his thighs open and John lying heavy between them, rocking his hips in impossible, serpentine motions. Sherlock leaned up to nip at his ear lobe, then requested, “More.”

John obliged, bracing himself with a hand on Sherlock’s shoulder, weighing down onto his belly and chest, crushing into him with force and urgency. John’s mouth came open against Sherlock’s neck, and his tongue was thick and warm, his teeth pressing hard.

“Fuck,” John cursed. “Gorgeous you. I’d have rubbed myself raw, needing to get off with you.” He sighed heavily, hummed. Sherlock, rolling up to meet him, opened his legs wider, then clutched John between them. Robbed of breath by the weight of John’s torso against his own, he whined, and John forced a hard kiss on him.

Sherlock let out a frustrated, needy noise, and John hushed, “Quiet now, they’ll hear.” He slowed and lightened, letting their breath settle. They stared into each other’s eyes, telling each other the story, playing the parts. Sherlock’s gut fluttered and he gulped. _Shh_ , John mouthed at him, and grinned like he was getting away with something illicit. He worked one hand between them, cradling Sherlock through his clothes. “Can I?”

“You want to?”

“So much.” John’s voice collapsed on it, and he kissed again, desperate and messy.

“Then yes.”

In moments they were slick with spit and fucking up against each other in steady rhythm; Sherlock gratefully pinned to the mattress and John hectic for the finish.

“I’d love to have dirtied up your little bed,” he whispered, voice dry and harsh beside Sherlock’s ear. “Wanting to suck you, fuck you, eat your pretty arse, but only this. Just this.”

“Come,” Sherlock whispered back.

 _“Christ.”_ John’s motions became unpredictable, and he shuddered, so close. Sherlock reached down to press one fingertip hard against John’s hole, and the whole thing was over in less than a minute, John groaning loudly against Sherlock’s cheek, Sherlock tumbling after him within a few strokes, one hand curled around John’s tight-flexed bicep.

Over the course of long minutes, their breath was caught and they lay side by side, the wrong way across the bed.

“Shower?” John suggested.

“Mm.” Sherlock was noncommittal; his brain—usually quieter after a good shag—was tangled up in thoughts of his flat, his family, the flight back to Boston, training camp. “Maybe I should sell this place,” he mused to the ceiling.

“Why, because your dad disapproves?”

“That would tend to make me hold on to it,” Sherlock replied. “But whether it was him that said it or someone else, it’s true it doesn’t make good financial sense to pay a mortgage on a place I only use a few weeks a year.”

 “Well, no need to decide right now.” John smiled and rolled closer, a welcome weight against Sherlock’s side. “Shower first. More food. Movie and bed.”

“A list of several of my favourite things.”

Sherlock returned John’s grin, felt anxiety melting off him. His man was gorgeous, so delightfully sturdy. Listened well. Said every right thing. As evidence of his perfection, John started to rise from the bed, tipped his head toward the bath. “ _Viens avec moi, ma moitié_.”

“ _Je ne peux pas refuser_.”

 

They recovered from their jet lag in an ultra-high-end log house on its own secluded peak in the Green Mountains, with views as far as New York state to the west and Canada to the north. There were rooms enough they might never even have had to interact with John’s sister Kim and her new boyfriend—Sherlock and John’s Boston Brawlers teammate—Shane Thurston, but the four frequently found themselves hovering around the kitchen island, making meals together, or sitting on deep sofas in the parlour, drinking wine and chatting for long hours between daytime excursions and late retirements to their separate wings. It was a proper holiday, one Sherlock felt he richly deserved after the forced march of time spent with his family. He and John visited two wineries, strolled a quaint downtown as unrepentant tourists (John bought Sherlock a horrible ball cap with a three-dimensional, plush moose sticking out the front, and Sherlock retaliated by wearing it publicly for four hours). In the evenings the four assembled dinners and Sherlock talked about the wine he’d bought that day, though it was not for him to say whether the education they received enhanced anyone’s appreciation of it.

John’s appreciation of Sherlock, though, was never in doubt; he listened attentively to Sherlock’s lectures and his face became serious as he sipped, searching each mouthful for notes of cedar, or evaluating the coating on his tongue. One cabernet turned their teeth blue, but they all agreed to forgive it. Indeed, Sherlock thought it so exceptional he went back to the winery and bought three bottles to take back home.

Thurston arrived at the log house clean-shaven, his skin tanned from a summer outdoors, with a fading bruise under his eye resultant from a left hook during a sparring match at the boxing gym he owned. Kim’s cheeks were plumper than Sherlock remembered, and she laughed loudly and much, which Sherlock could see pleased her brother, who ran a constant low-grade fever of concern about her. Whenever she told a story, Thurston looked smilingly at her as if she had hung the moon. He drew out her chair at the dining table, held doors for her, asked her if she needed anything. Based on all facts in evidence, Sherlock thought it a good match.

On their last day in Vermont, Thurston and Kim excused themselves to bed early, with blatantly false claims of exhaustion John readily accepted rather than contemplate the fact of his sister and his former teammate in a heated clutch.

“Ready?” Sherlock asked, lifting an eyebrow.

“We shouldn’t do this here, in someone else’s house. There’ll be a mess.” John was going into his suitcase for the needed _accoutrements_ even as he protested.

“They have a cleaner come in before the next renters arrive. It’s what we paid for.” Sherlock turned on lights and checked mirrors. A round, magnifying one extended from the wall on a brass arm. “Don’t ruin this for me, John; I’ve been looking forward to it.”

“Me, too, I’ll admit.” John came near—cutting a pleasing figure in a tight t-shirt and slim-cut khaki shorts—and Sherlock reached for him, cradling John’s bearded jaw in both hands.

“I’m going to miss it.”

“Yours, too,” John agreed, and they kissed, and leaned away, and petted each other’s faces. John laid out on the bathroom’s wide, granite countertop small scissors, razors, a badger brush he’d inherited from his dad, and a mug of shaving soap. For the better part of an hour, the two stood side by side and in a manner that felt like a shared bath or a promising striptease, trimmed away the excess whiskers from their playoff beards, then shaved their own and each other’s faces.

Running the razor down John’s cheek, up his throat, Sherlock licked his own lips, tasting the citrus scent of the after shave John had patted onto his newly smooth face. A once-a-year, special sort of foreplay, intimate and slightly dangerous, a grooming ritual that bonded them. Sherlock wiped the last of the soap from John’s jaw with a hot, damp towel, tilting his face this way and that to catch the light and assure he hadn’t missed any spots. A splash of stinging after shave that made John suck his teeth, was followed by a deep kiss that drove them both to reach for something to lean on or fall back against, lest their knees fail them.

They came up smiling, and Sherlock groped at the front of John’s shorts.

“Oh, you’re not alone,” John told him with a laugh. He cleared his throat. “I’ve a plan to watch the sun set from that deck out there; tonight’s our last chance.”

“You make the fire; I’ll bring the slick.” Sherlock passed through to the bedroom, and to his pleasure, John let go a complaining whimper of sexual frustration as he went.

Within the hour, they’d brought a bottle of wine and the last of the good cheese, along with some cashews and pick-your-own strawberries from the kitchen. John had got a fire going in the bowl-shaped fireplace centered on the wooden deck nearly as big as the entire flat back in Boston; and Sherlock had fetched every sex accessory they’d packed and laid them out on a small table beside an over-the-top piece of outdoor furniture: a queen bed piled with pillows, its lower corner draped with soft throw-blankets, a mosquito net hanging above, ready to be unfurled at dusk. There was soft lighting, a sound system playing Adés, Stravinsky, and Chopin—music to set a particular mood—one suited to the decadent scenario presented by a bed outdoors in the mountains on a summer evening, with no one nearby to see or hear the practical outcome of evoking such a mood.

John widened his eyes at Sherlock’s display of dirty sundries. “Are we expecting guests?” he joked.

“Yes, CRUZR is just chockablock with horny lumberjacks and moose-ranchers,” Sherlock affirmed. “I’ve cast a wide net.”

“We should do some warm-ups, then, if there’s about to be a forest orgy.” John accepted a proffered glass of vinho verde—Portuguese, not local, of course—and found a comfortable place for himself amid the mounds of cushions, contrary to his own suggestion. “C’mere, then, and let me get an arm around the most handsome man in the Northeast Kingdom.” Sherlock accepted the invitation, curling up beside John, their arms in an ‘x’ as each rested a hand on the other’s thigh.

“Perhaps I’ll sell my London flat and buy this place,” Sherlock mused.

“I could get used to something like this,” John agreed.

Sherlock sipped at the wine, let it release its mild effervescence against his palate before swallowing. “It’s only the appealing fantasy of a neverending holiday. A week in a beautiful place you don’t have to clean or maintain, uncluttered by your lifetime’s collection of junk, at last feeling relaxed and treating yourself to experiences you wouldn’t normally have, food you wouldn’t normally eat. You trick yourself into thinking it would always be like that. Or that it could.”

“I’m retired,” John reminded him with a grin. “I’m on holiday until I die.”

“Says the man with two weeks of media interviews on his calendar the moment we leave here,” Sherlock reminded. “Sounds like work to me.”

“Hush; we live in a six-million-dollar tree house now.”

“Right.”

“With lumberjacks on the way.”

Sherlock turned his head just enough to bite down on John’s pectoral muscle through his t-shirt, reminding him to be grateful for what he had in the moment.

“Ouch! Hey!” he protested, and pushed Sherlock gently away with the tips of his fingers. “You’re right, though. Back to reality on Monday.” He sighed.

Sherlock imagined he should have been a bit more focused on his level of indulgence in food and wine during his summer vacation—he’d got workouts in, did some running and swimming, but he dreaded to anticipate the number on the scale, his first day at training camp. It would be the same mini-disaster for them all, he knew, but Sherlock feared he might pass his own, arbitrarily-set upper limit, and that would mean extra time in the gym, less cake and more kale. His next draft of wine was deeper and he spared no time to savour, a rebellion against the demands of his career. He would be a hockey player in August; June and July were for being a real person. At least as close as Sherlock ever got.

“Are those birds or bats?” John asked, motioning out to their right, above the trees.

“Birds, I think,” Sherlock said. He inhaled deeply, exhaled as slow and long as he could manage, and let his muscles melt.

They carried on talking about nothing much, sipping their wine, eating a little, as the sun descended in slow motion over the roll of mountaintops visible in the distance. Sherlock smacked at his calf—a mosquito, unsuccessful at its aim—and John moved to stir the fire while Sherlock untied the ribbons holding up the bug net. They laughed self-consciously at the glamour of a luxury vacation house and all its fripperies, but once beneath the canopy, with the sky turning violet and their bare feet cool enough to want the blankets, it did begin to feel like a place they belonged.

“That really is beautiful,” Sherlock said quietly, once the top edge of the sun vanished below the horizon and the sky was painted pink and gold. “Thank you for thinking of this.”

John favoured him with a kiss on the temple, and they set aside their near-empty glasses, drawing each other low and close, the only sounds the crack and rustle of the fire and insects and frogs singing to let each other know they’d survived the day.

A near-whisper. “Have you enjoyed it? The holiday? You seem so much more relaxed than you did at your parents’.”

“Yes, of course.” A kiss, and then another.

“It’s nice to see. I do wish we could just stay here, like this.” John held him close for a long moment before relaxing again.

“You’re thinking about what it will be like not to be playing,” Sherlock said knowingly.

“A bit. Now and then. You and Thurty up my arse all week hasn’t let me forget it very often.”

“You didn’t tell me you’d hooked up with Thurston.”

John made a disgusted noise. “Yeah. No. I’m sure it will feel weird when you go to camp and I don’t. But it was the right time for me to quit.” He sounded as if he were convincing himself. “I promised myself. And Kim.”

“But?” Sherlock prompted.

“Of course I wish I hadn’t had that crash. A concussion was my dealbreaker, but I can’t say I don’t wonder if I’d have played one or two more if that hadn’t happened.”

Sherlock kissed a trail down the edge of John’s jaw, down the side of his throat, wanting to reassure him.

“You can’t know; don’t torture yourself with What If.”

John hummed. “Wise words. Easier said than done.”

“I know.”

Their words trailed off, and it became full dark with surprising speed. The stars were vibrant and countless, so unlike the sky over the many cities they’d bedded down in as to seem unreal. A log shifted in the fireplace, threw up sparks and a loud cracking noise. They undressed each other slowly, taking time to kiss and praise, to trace shadows and warm each other’s newly-bared skin with sighs. Sherlock sucked gently at the just of bone at the outer corner of John’s wrist. Raked fingers through his chest hair. Rolled up to lie along the length of him, and later rolled down to feel the weight of solid hips and thighs as John hovered above him, adoring eyes just visible in the faded, filtered evening light.

They added soft words and expulsions of held breath to the mild ambient noise, and after awhile, growls and moans. Despite Sherlock’s overpreparedness—a sex-shop display of scented and flavoured lubricants, insertable and vibrating toys, straps and ribbons and a silk-satin eye mask—in the end they needed only themselves, hands and tongues and a steady undulation of their bodies, as close as they could get. Wordless. Winded. Together to the finish, mouths open to catch each other’s breath.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A "bye week" is a week off during the season (part of the players' union collective bargaining agreement), usually in late January or early- to mid-February.

Sherlock was already stretched out on the sofa by the time John—devastating in his dove-grey summer suit, pink shirt, and lavender necktie—arrived home from his first proper workday as the figurehead of the Heads Up Foundation.

“How was the first day of school?” he asked, shedding his jacket and folding it over the back of a kitchen chair.

“There’s tea,” Sherlock told him, nodding at the kettle but too knackered to get up and fix him a cup. In reply to his inquiry, Sherlock offered, “I’m fat and out of shape. Luckily all but the young ones are, too.”

“Sore?” John grinned, a bit devilishly, which Sherlock thought a bit cruel; he very well knew how painful the first day at training camp could be. He loosened his necktie and top two shirt buttons, ignored the tea in favour of lifting Sherlock’s calves in his hands so they could share the sofa. He went straight to work massaging Sherlock’s bare feet. “Blister there. I told you to break in those trainers a bit more.”

“I’ll just sleep here tonight,” Sherlock said by way of reply. “Set me an alarm for half-seven.”

John pulled a face of exaggerated sympathy and cooed, “Poor you.” He pressed four fingers into the midsole of Sherlock’s right foot, squeezed, and dragged. Sherlock let go a moan; the sensation bordered on erotic.

“What about you? Good day at the office?” Sherlock’s eyes wouldn’t open; he curled his toes, then flexed them, while John made circles around his arch.

“Good, yeah. Meeting this morning with the publicist arranging my speaking engagements—that’s a bit weird—and then lunch with a writer from the Globe’s Sunday magazine. She’s doing a big story on concussion in kids’ leagues. This afternoon another meeting, with the guy they’ve got writing speeches for me.”

“You could write your own,” Sherlock said, a bit indignantly. How dare anyone assume his man was not articulate and brainy, just because he’d gone to the NHL instead of university?

“No, I know. I sort of told him that. We’re going to work together; he seemed keen to get my input.”

“Good then.” Sherlock sighed, and John took hold of his other foot, firmly pinching and releasing his Achilles tendon, then digging into the flat of his heel with strong thumbs.

“I swear,” John told him, “Most of the day I felt like they were going to come for me. It’s the first time I haven’t reported to training camp in over twenty years. Kept getting this weird panic I wasn’t where I was supposed to be.”

“I can imagine.”

“Dinner?” John inquired then; it was nearly seven.

“Already ordered it.”

“Genius.”

“You’ll have to answer the door; I can’t move.”

“Well you know you should; you’re only going to be feeling worse tomorrow if you don’t keep your muscles warm.”

“There is only jam where my muscles once were,” Sherlock reported.

“Shuttle-runs tomorrow,” John said threateningly, and Sherlock couldn’t repress a grin at his teasing, though it was immediately followed with a groan as reality set in.

“I’ll likely need those vomit buckets.”

John finished massaging his feet, moved on to more-than-softly sliding the knuckles of one fist up and down Sherlock’s calf muscles. He’d toed off his loafers and set his sock feet on the coffee table, slumped deeper into the sofa. They stayed there sharing the comedown from their days until the buzzer went, and John brought in bags of dinner delivered from the second-nearest Japanese restaurant, all of John’s usual favourites, but only raw fish and miso broth for Sherlock. Nothing fried; no rice. He’d only just missed his upper-limit weigh-in, with less two pounds to spare. He knew he had much work to do before the pre-season started and his stats were published on the players’ roster.

As was their custom, the two tucked into their meal with all haste, and Sherlock managed the exertion required to work the remote, settling on a programme featuring over-the-top luxury vacation spots, from ice hotels draped with fur rugs and blankets, to gilded Parisian apartments with butler and staff included. Side by side with their knees touching, they leaned over food in plastic trays, the chopsticks cheap and splintery.

“Shall I open that wine we brought back?” John asked halfway through the meal, while the television showed a tour of a mega-yacht anchored near Dubai’s Palm Islands.

“Calories I don’t need, for the time being,” Sherlock said. “But go ahead if you like.”

“I won’t waste it; I wouldn’t finish the bottle on my own.” Instead he poured tea for both of them, left Sherlock’s black but brought the sugar bowl just in case. Sherlock tipped in only a third of his usual.

John gestured at the telly with his chopsticks, and said around a mouthful of teriyaki, “There. That’s where we need to go. During the bye week.” He chewed, gulped. “Pass me my phone, I’ll book it.”

The location featured was tropical, white sand and turquoise sea. Individual cabanas fitted out like high-end hotel suites, open to the breeze, huge white-linen-covered beds facing the sea. Not another soul in sight, though no doubt it would be easy to summon one to fulfill any need that should arise—more champagne, late breakfast, extra towels, a third or fourth for an erotic afternoon romp accompanied by the crash of waves on the tiny, private beach.

“It’s lovely. Where is it?” Sherlock agreed, and he couldn’t help but imagine John in various arrangements on the bed or the chaise, or on a blanket on the sand. Sherlock’s diet would have to stay dull, and he’d have to avoid alcohol for a few weeks, but at least his most decadent desires could be indulged at will, with no risk of harm to his conditioning. Might even burn some extra calories.

“Bali, I think. But there are other places like it; I’ve seen them in adverts and that. Just us two, in a place like that, for a week? My idea of a perfect holiday.”

Sherlock sat back from his empty plastic dishware, stretching already-sore arms well over his head with a grumbling groan as he sank into the sofa. “First day at the new job and already you’re planning a week away?”

John laughed. “It was a good day, I swear.”

“Finish your food and clean your teeth. I have plans for the rest of the evening,” Sherlock ordered, and John needed no second invitation. He swept what was left into the paper bag it had been delivered in, crushed the top of the bag shut and binned it in the kitchen as he passed through to the bath.

“You’re not too sore? Too tired?” he called through the half-open door, and the taps ran.

“For sex? How dare you,” Sherlock replied.

 

_“At last the day has come! The Boston Brawlers’ home opener here at the sold-out Boston Garden. After a summer spent taking their turns with the Stanley Cup—which went as far as a youth hockey league arena in the Czech Republic with this year’s captain Pietr Kocur, west to Vancouver in the hands of Vancouver-native Chris Sullivan, to North Dakota State with former Bison Jake Mellon, and countless other hometown venues across North America and Europe—your Brawlers are back and ready to work. I’m Jack Edwards, with me as always my partner Andy Brickley, and Molly Hooper at ice level. Thanks for joining Boston Sports Network’s coverage of the start of this Brawlers season. Six, one, and one in the pre-season, the Brawlers are already off to a pretty darn impressive start, Brick.”_

_“That’s right, Jack. Only a few changes to the roster this year, some with more impact than others on team chemistry, a couple of question marks about whether this year’s team is going to have the same feel as last year’s Stanley Cup winning roster. Most notable are the retirement of last year’s team captain, veteran defenseman John Watson, who got a lot of credit for setting the tone both on and off the ice; the somewhat controversial trade of Taylor Sawyer—the second-line right winger who had an impressive, high-scoring rookie year here in Boston—to the Tornadoes; and major shakeups in the Brawlers defense: four guys new to the team, three of them making their NHL debuts. So far looking good in the pre-season, as you say, and the Brawlers’ front office as well as the fans hoping for another championship year.”_

_“The seventeen thousand, five-sixty-five at the Garden tonight are indeed full of hope, as we begin a brand new season of Boston Brawlers hockey. When we come back from this short break, the puck drops and the game is on!”_

Sherlock went through his motions as the music blared for the warm-ups, bending his knees, snapping his wrist to catch pucks fired at him by his teammates, stretching upright and then settling into his crouch, rattling his stick against the goal posts—left, right, left—and tossing his head on his neck. He stopped puck after puck, then went to the bench for a final equipment check and to wait for the start. The first game of the season on home ice meant an introduction of the whole team, not just the starters; Sherlock hated the delay but enjoyed his moment in the spotlight, the low, growling cry of “ _Hooooolmes_ ” from the crowd.

He shed his mask for the anthem, took the long way around back to his goal and reset himself, working his skate blades into the ice of the goal crease to rough it up the way he liked before he repeated his ritual. Stick hit the posts, head got a shake, crouch, a glide forward, then a glide back and in, and he was right where he belonged. The bear in the mouth of its cave. The man in front of the house he would fight to defend.

Kocur was once again wearing the captain’s C on his sweater—and though Sherlock had, as usual, voted for himself, he was satisfied that if it had to be anyone other than John Watson, the team had done the right thing by going back to Pietr Kocur. Sherlock wasn’t sure about Kocur’s new linemate, a rookie fresh out of Harvard called Joe Mercer, and didn’t fully trust him, but the kid was a worker and listened more than talked, both good signs he might work out.

The first line offense was center Michel Bouchard, with Thurston and Mellon on the wings, always reliable. Their first-of-the-season opponents, the Milwaukee Muskies, had given the Brawlers the business in the post-season, but already were down a second-line forward and a veteran D thanks to pre-season injuries, and had four new offensive players due to trades and two retirements. They had already begun not to look too strong by mid-September. Sherlock predicted he might stop thirty; his team would win the game easily, probably by at least two. He was focused, but also confident, as the puck dropped at center ice.

_“Just over three minutes played here in the first period, and the Brawlers have already got massive attacking zone time, and a handful of scoring chances. The Muskies still finding their feet . Sullivan controls the puck up high, ahead to his new linemate Lachlan Ford, Winnette tries for the poke check but can’t get the puck away from Ford.  Ford back to Sullivan, the one-timer, a bomb, he scores! Chris Sullivan has the first Brawlers goal of the season and Boston gets out to an early one-nothing lead.”_

_“Good puck control by these Brawlers forwards, Jack, and as you say, lots of time in the Muskies’ zone, setting up scoring chances. Sullivan and Ford make a cool, smooth passing play and Sullivan knew just where to put the puck, up high on the stick side while Milwaukee goaltender James Ziegler was focused more in the middle of the ice, maybe with a screen there from Shane Thurston. Sullivan makes his first of the season, first for the Brawlers, and Boston’s got the first on the scoreboard tonight.”_

As the skaters reset at the center dot, John’s former linemate Corey Hatch checked in. “Lonely back here, Holmesy?”

“I’m using the free time to think up a title for my memoirs.”

“We’ll try to keep it quiet for you.”

“Excellent.”

Sherlock drew out his water bottle and jetted some into his mouth, casting a glance toward his skybox, where he knew John was watching. They’d joked the previous season when John was out on injured reserve with his not-officially-acknowledged concussion that the two should work out a signal, of Sherlock saying hello to John from his spot in goal. Sherlock found he wished they had, and resolved to settle it before the next game.

_“As the first period winds to a close, the Milwaukee Muskies are still looking for the pep in their step, completely outskated by the Brawlers, who lead them two to nothing. Bouchard to the faceoff against Leukkens, wins it. Mellon handles the puck, shoots, deflected off the blocker of Ziegler. Rebound loose in front, Kocur picks it up, the wrist shot, SCORES! Pietr Kocur sneaks one past the pads of James Ziegler and Boston is up by three to finish the first period.”_

In the room during the intermission, Sherlock grabbed his phone from his bag and texted John.

_I’ve worked out a signal. You’ll know it when you see._

_TXT from JW: Not the fellating your stick thing. There are kids watching._

Back out on the ice getting ready for the second--just before starting his usual choreography of stick, neck, crouch, and settle--Sherlock spent a moment in his crease with one knee on the ice. John would know what it meant.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks once more to kind friends and chapter sponsors LonghornLetters and K2DangerGirl, who got to name characters Alex George (Sherlock's new teammate/suitemate) and Iain Westcott (John's writing partner)!

Four days later, Sherlock and John were faced with a situation they’d been dreading for months: the Brawlers’ first road trip that John, committed to work with his foundation, would not be able to attend.

“I might be able to make it down for the Shock, on Saturday,” John volunteered. They were in bed, in the flat they now shared, with nearly an hour before either of them had to get up and ready himself to leave.

“It would be foolish; we’re flying back that night anyway.”

“I know. But I’ll try to arrange it if you want me there. Just say the word.”

Sherlock stroked a palm absently down John’s forearm, patted his hand once. “Nevermind. We’ll spend all day Sunday in bed and by Monday all will be well.”

“Who are you rooming with, by the way?”

“Alex George.”

“From the Gold Rush. I never met him outside a game; what’s his story?”

“Late twenties. Married. No children, good because he cheats. Closing in on three hundred points. They’ve got him playing left on the third line. He was rather put-out not to be made alternate captain, though how he feels he is qualified is anyone’s guess. Lazy during the second half of every practice.”

“OK guy?”

Sherlock could sense what John was really asking, so answered accordingly. “He hasn’t put in a request to change roomies so I assume he’s not a rampant homophobe. Or, now that I think of it, perhaps he sees it as an opportunity to target me for a hate crime.” Sherlock smirked, and John looked chagrined.

“It’s not outrageous for me to worry, just a bit. The veteran Brawlers have had years to get used to you; the rest of the league only got confirmation of the rumours a couple months ago.”

“I’ll be fine, John.”

“In that case, good luck to him, rooming with Sherlock Holmes,” John grinned.

Sherlock rolled away and reached for his phone to check the time. “I’ve got to get up; it’s Jeremy’s day.”

“Tell them hello from me.”

Sherlock was still adjusting to visiting his young friend only once a month, instead of the weekly visits he’d enjoyed for the previous few years. Jeremy’s parents had at last risen to the top of a waiting list for a particular private school’s day program, one they’d been trying to get Jeremy placed in for the best part of three years. His mother Beth had done a commendable job assembling educational, therapeutic, and social supports for him in the meantime, but even Sherlock—an outer-circle friend of the family—had known it was a source of enormous stress for both parents. Once Beth had shared the news, during one of his Tuesday morning visits in late July, Sherlock made sure to call the school and arrange to assume responsibility for the finances—anonymously, of course. The embraces he got from the Porters the following week told him they suspected he was their benefactor, but it wasn’t discussed, which suited Sherlock just fine.

“Beth’s already invited us for Thanksgiving,” Sherlock informed him, unashamedly watching John as he left the bed, naked and hard-bodied and always so tempting. Sherlock checked the time once more, made calculations, felt grim and disappointed.

“We’re going,” was John’s immediate, cheerful response. “That huge family? All that chaos? Their summer party was one of the happiest days I’ve spent. All the good bits of family time, none of the baggage.”

“I’ll accept with pleasure, in that case,” Sherlock acquiesced. Parties—other than those thrown weekly inside repurposed warehouses, with cover charges and rotating themes, decorated with go-go boys and lit by neon—were not exactly his area, but if attending a family fete would please John Watson, Sherlock did not need to be asked twice.

John was by then dressed enough that Sherlock could set aside the distraction of watching him, and retreated to the shower. On his return to the bedroom, Sherlock expected to find John fixing his necktie, ready to head for the waiting car to take him to his foundation’s office across the river in Kendall Square. There John would rendezvous with a cadre of public relations women, spokespersons, middle managers, and all their assistants to caravan back across the bridge into Boston, and John would debut his hour-long talk in a Copley Square hotel, for a convention of youth hockey coaches. Thus it was a surprise to instead discover him dressed only in mostly-buttoned shirt, boxer briefs, and dark socks, sitting on the edge of the bed on Sherlock’s side, with his head bowed into his hand. In his other hand, resting loosely on his thigh, was his phone. A creeping sense of distress itched through him, to find his man looking so out of sorts.

“Something wrong?” Possibilities raced through his brain: a bad result on a medical test; something horrible had befallen his sister; negative press about the Heads Up Foundation of which John was so proud, and which was still so new.

“No,” John said, and shook his head but did not lift it. After a moment he moved to drag the pad of his thumb, then the side of his index finger, beneath his eyes. “Nothing’s wrong. The Thrashers are retiring my number.”

Sherlock’s relief radiated through his chest, followed quickly by a wash of happy pride. “Of course they are,” he said decisively, reaching for John’s phone, which he presumed must display an email from the Hamilton Thrashers’ head office. He scanned the screen: an invitation for John to attend a ceremony in his honour before a Thrashers game in mid-November.

“It’s a Brawlers game,” Sherlock noticed, and their gazes met; John’s eyes were still glistening. “A coincidence, you think?”

“Possibly, but I doubt it. It would have been difficult for you to be there if it wasn’t.”

Sherlock set the phone on the bed by John’s hip, leaned to press a kiss into the hair at the crown of his head. “It’s well deserved. You carried that team for years.”

“I didn’t,” John protested, recognising the joke in Sherlock’s praise of him.

“Tell your sister,” Sherlock prompted, and turned to the wardrobe for a suit. John dialed, waited.

“Hey, dude,” came Kim’s voice. “What’s up, it’s Saturday morning and I’m asleep.”

“Hey. You’re on speaker; Sherlock’s here.”

“Hey, Sherlock.”

“Hello.”

“Listen, I have some news. . .” John began.

“Oh my god,” Kim exclaimed in an excitedly high pitch. John threw a puzzled glance Sherlock’s way; Sherlock shrugged.

“What?”

 “Eee! Nothing. Go. Go, tell it.”

“Got an email from the Thrashers this morning; they’re retiring eighteen.”

“Shut! _Up!_ Dude,that’s crazy. Amazing. Congrats; I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks,” John said. “What did you think I was going to say?”

“Nothing. I didn’t know. Nevermind, nothing. I am so excited for you! Can I come?”

“Uh, yeah!” John said with friendly sarcasm. “I’d be angry if you didn’t.”

“Sherlock, you’ll be there?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Sherlock assured.

“Boston’s the opponent that night,” John told her.

“Awesome. Dude, Dad would be so proud of you. Mum, too.”

John’s eyes reddened and he cursed. Sherlock touched his shoulder on his way by.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Anyway, wanted to let you know. So I guess I’ll look forward to seeing you.”

“You know it. I’m really psyched for you, dude. Congratulations again.”

“Thank you. Thanks.” John was beaming. “All right, talk soon. Love you.”

“Love you, too, dude.”

John rang off and dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, rubbing away fresh tears. “She had to say that!” he exclaimed, and sobbed a laugh at his sister’s nerve. “Had to say that about my folks.”

“I’m sure she’s right. They would be quite proud.”

“Yeah, I know.” John’s shoulders went up, then down, on a hearty, head-clearing sigh.

“And so am I.” Sherlock reached for him, and John stepped up into his embrace, which was crushing, and accompanied by another firm kiss in his hair, then on the tail of his eyebrow, his cheek, and finally his mouth. They lingered in it for a few moments, then reverted to Sherlock just holding him. John’s hands were clasped at the small of Sherlock’s back. “Well done,” Sherlock told him. “It was a truly magnificent career.”

“You noticed?” John joked, as they withdrew from each other. He resumed dressing, and Sherlock headed back into the bathroom to arrange his hair.

“Well, I saw you play last season. You weren’t bad.”

“Very funny.”

Sherlock dampened his fingertips and went after a few waving locks that wanted taming, plucking and shaping in front of the bathroom mirror.

“It’s going to be strange coming back here tonight, with you on the plane to Chicago.”

“Mm. I did grow accustomed to dinner and a movie with you.”

“Well, you’ve got the boys on the team, anyway. I’ll be all on my own.”

“Will you? Is CRUZR glitching?”

“Again, very funny.”

“It’s what I would do, in your situation,” Sherlock shrugged.

“Well, I suppose I’ll just play it by ear. There’s always porn.”

“Yes, and thank heavens for that,” Sherlock agreed. In fact, he was rather dreading his first road trip without John, his first with a new suite-mate, an unknown quantity. At least if they’d given him Mellon, he’d know what to expect. Endlessly being shown photos of near-naked puckbunnies on Mellon’s phone, endlessly being reminded of Mellon’s sexual fetish for intercourse with women’s cleavage, endlessly being invited to get thrown out of hotel bars with his teammates. Who knew what Alex George had in store for him?

 

_“There’s the horn, and the Brawlers take it, three-nothing against the Chicago Mavericks. Sherlock Holmes gets his second shut-out win in just seven games, and the Brawlers will play one more on this road trip, Saturday in Long Island City against the Shoreham Shock. Please join us. Until then, I’m Jack Edwards, and from me, my partner Andy Brickley, Molly Hooper at ice level, and all of us at Boston Sports Network, good night.”_

Sherlock gladly accepted a couple dozen bumps on his helmet in recognition of his shutout, showered, dressed, and filed onto the bus. His teammates were jovial and loud, trading praise and insults in roughly equal quantity as usual. Sherlock held his phone low, scrolling and tapping. It interrupted him with a quick double-buzz and a text appeared.

_TXT from JW: Great game. You looked sharp as a knife._

_I bet you say that to all the men you’re shagging._

_TXT from JW: Hardly a universally applicable line, but I’ll keep it in the back pocket._

_Still working on the essay?_

John was writing an Op-Ed for the Boston Globe, with some behind-the-curtain scheme to have it talked about by sports radio, in social media, and elsewhere, all of it designed to surround the night of his number being retired in Hamilton.

_TXT from JW: Nearly done with the draft. Sent it this afternoon to the writer, Iain, to get some feedback on how I should end it._

_It will be brilliant._

_TXT from JW: Bet YOU say that to all the men YOU’RE shagging._

_You know I haven’t got time to talk to them._

_TXT from JW: Totally knackered; going to bed. Just wanted to let you know you’re gorgeous and amazing._

_Good night then._

_TXT from JW: Night, moitié_.

Sherlock’s phone buzzed with another notification that pleased him.

 _CRUZR message from HammerOfThor: Hey, beautiful. Can’t stop looking at your pix_.

Sherlock tilted his phone’s screen, though no one on the team bus was paying him the least attention. A glance out the window let him know they were already rolling up the hotel drive.

 _JanuaryMan: Is that so?_ Sherlock clicked through to his suitor’s profile; a series of photos so compelling Sherlock immediately suspected they were fakes. A towering, thick-chested muscle queen with a voluminous, hipsteresque beard. Sherlock checked the backgrounds of the photos, the different expressions on his face, and decided he just might be real after all.

_HammerOfThor: Love to get my hands on those legs._

_JanuaryMan: And do what?_

_HammerOfThor: Bite them all over. Not to hurt you but you look good enough to eat. Lick that bulge I see in that mirror pic_.

Sherlock had a sudden realization he had not updated his profile photos in ages.

_JanuaryMan: Too tempting to refuse. I’ll come to you?_

Sherlock was given an address and a number to text when he arrived. He joined the flow of his teammates filing off the bus, and while they headed into the hotel lobby through the slow-revolving door, Sherlock peeled off from the group and engaged the concierge stationed at the taxi stand. In under a minute, he was on his way.


	7. Chapter 7

The Brawlers had an out-of-the-ordinary daytime flight to Long Island, and were mandated to be on the bus from their hotel at nine sharp. With just ten minutes to spare, Sherlock found himself wondering if he should knock on George’s door, as there had been no sign of life from him yet that morning. Sherlock was cross about even having to consider it; there was no way in heaven or hell he was going to spend the season nannying a grown man who’d been in the league long enough to know how to get himself to a bus on time. None of it forecasted positivity for their stint as road-trip roomies.

Even as Sherlock decided that just this once, he’d pound on the door and give a shout, George’s bedroom door opened and he rumbled out, dressed in jeans and a Brawlers’-logo hooded sweatshirt, rucksack over one shoulder. Though not exceptionally tall—the roster had him listed at 5’11” but Sherlock thought it was rounded upward—George was solidly built, with broad shoulders and thoroughly muscled arms. Alex George was one of the league’s unacknowledged but ever-present enforcers, a decent producer on the ice but with a clear expectation he should pester opponents with hard hits, pushing the envelope on nearly penalty-worthy behaviour, working into his regular course of play stick-grabs, thrown elbows, and covert slashes. If a fight needed starting—or ending—along with veteran Shane Thurston, George was now a Brawlers’ go-to man. He wore his fair hair short and tight to his scalp; tattoos of his childrens’ names and newborn footprints meandered up and down his forearms. His wedding ring was thick and showy, shiny platinum with diamonds in slender rows at its edges. Liked to spend money, clearly. . .or his wife did. Undoubtedly he was up to his neck in debt despite his six-figure annual salary and multi-year contract.

“Eh, Holmesy, how’s it hanging?”

“Thought you’d overslept.”

“Nah. I always sleep in. Never missed a plane or a morning skate yet, though.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t worry; you don’t have to be my wake-up call. I’ll always make it.”

“That’s good to know.” Sherlock shouldered his duffel, took a last glance around to be sure he wasn’t leaving anything of worth behind.

“Should I worry if I get up for something to eat at three a.m. and you’re not around?” George’s question held in it the story of the previous night, without prying for details. Obviously he—liked everyone else in the league—now knew Sherlock was in a relationship with John, and it could hardly be missed that John was clearly not the one Sherlock had spent his after-game hours with.

“You need not worry at all,” Sherlock assured him.

“Mind my own business,” George said knowingly. “I get it; I’m not always alone at three a.m., either.”

“Fine, then.”

“My lips are sealed.”

“It really doesn’t matter either way,” Sherlock said, but it seemed far less than vital to deliver a lecture on ethical non-monogamy to a serial adulterer and virtual stranger so early in the morning, so he did not elaborate on precisely why George’s discretion didn’t matter.

“Yeah, well,” George said, and shrugged.

“I mind my own business, as well,” Sherlock informed him. He looked at his wristwatch, anxious to escape further conversation, lest he find himself the vessel for either guilty confession or macho bragging, neither of which he would welcome. “We should go.”

George’s contract rider called for local beer, mass-market crisps, a video game system, and bags of mixed nuts, the last of which he grabbed on his way out the door. Sherlock left behind an unopened packet of cigarettes and three unopened bottles of wine, at least some of which would no doubt follow him to their next hotel, in Shoreham.

 

_“Buono handles the puck up-ice and into the Boston zone. Guinness is there to meet him, a short pass tape-to-tape, Guinness takes the wrist shot, and it deflects off the blocker of Sherlock Holmes. Buono takes control of the rebound, a few Brawlers around him but George can’t poke the puck away. Buono the one-timer, a massive, diving save by Holmes, and he smothers the puck to stop play.”_

_“A big move there by Sherlock Holmes, Jack. He had to cross the crease, maybe thought there’d be a pass across to Guinness on his stick side, but Buono tried to take advantage of the screen and made the one-time shot. Holmes was on his toes, though, and dove for it. Excellent save.”_

_“Less than twelve seconds to play; the Shock have pulled their goalie for the extra skater and here comes the faceoff. Bouchard wins it, Mellon takes it, skates around the goal, a pass up the boards to MacGraw, he takes off into the neutral zone, clock bleeding away, fires the bomb at the empty net. . .and there it is, folks! The Boston Brawlers win it, four to two, on that empty-net goal by MacGraw Another great night for the Brawlers’ D, and for goaltender Sherlock Holmes, showing in the last few weeks exactly why he’s a three-time Vezina trophy winner. Headed back to Boston after this three-and-oh roadtrip, this is Jack Edwards, with Andy Brickley and Molly Hooper, join us on BSN Wednesday for the Brawlers back at home to take on the New Jersey Demons.”_

Sherlock’s jaw ached, his chin was wet with saliva, and John’s prick in his mouth was a thrilling discomfort. It took effort to school his breathing, nostrils only, but it was easy to open his throat for his man’s heavy cock; Sherlock was grateful for it, so turned on by his own ability to elicit moans and curses, setting the pace and defining the boundaries, even there on his knees. John’s fingernails scratched loudly over the fabric of the chair arms. Sherlock was aware of the time of day, the open doors, his man’s bitten-down noises becoming less well-controlled.

“Fuck. _Sherlock_.”

“Mm-hmm. . .”

He combed fingertips through the hair of John’s calf; scrubbed a flat palm over the hair of his chest. Licked in anti-clockwise circles, sucked, swallowed, kissed. Teased the crepey skin of his bollocks. Pushed into the weight of John’s hand pressing against the back of his head. Breathed. Held his breath.

He stroked John through his orgasm, watched the spurting spoils of his endeavours jet up onto his man’s belly, had a feeling so very much like winning.

“Come up here. Let me watch you come,” John beseeched him, hand on his shoulder to coax him. Sherlock braced himself with one hand beside John’s neck against the chair back, set a knee in the narrow space beside John’s thigh. Licked his palm with a soaking tongue, gripped his prick and slid, another sort of aching, watching John watch him. His cum dripped and mingled with John’s, and he turned his face toward the ceiling, fighting to quiet a tight-lipped groan. He gulped air, shuddered, faded into the aftermath, liquid and unconcerned.

John’s mouth beside his ear. “I could watch you forever.”

“Feel free,” was Sherlock’s reply, and he kissed John where he could, jaw-edge and stubbled throat. He unraveled himself to stand, shuffled to the bath to fetch a towel. While John mopped up and rearranged his clothes—buttoning his shirt, drawing his trousers up from his ankles—Sherlock shed what remained of his own and traded them for a pair of Brawlers-logo warmup trousers and a polished-cotton dressing gown, left open. Eventually, he found his phone abandoned on the floor under the corner of his favoured leather armchair, and curled up there to study his calendar.

“We really should have thought to dovetail our roadtrips,” Sherlock mused, not wanting to trade his post-orgasmic melting sensation for a stress-induced tightening quite so soon, but the schedule of the upcoming weeks insisted upon causing consternation. “You’ve three nights on the west coast?”

“Four, now. They added a thing in Sacramento.”

“While I’m stuck home alone,” Sherlock complained, and pushed out his bottom lip.

“With plenty of practice and games to keep you busy, though,” John pointed out. “We meet up in Hamilton; I’ve got us a place booked for those two nights. If you can bear to be away from George for that long.” He smirked.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “George’s presence in the hotel suites barely registers. When he is not out drinking, he is asleep. I’ve never known a fully grown adult who could sleep so long or so soundly. Anyway, of course I’d always rather be with you. What hotel?”

“No, I rented a flat. So we can cook. Pretend we’re on holiday.”

Sherlock curled up closer to himself, drawing in his knees. “How thoughtful,” he said, and meant it, though it sounded as if he was teasing. “After the game with the Thrashers, I’m on a plane to Philadelphia, and you come home. This is madness. Call the Brawlers’ office and ask them to take you back. Here.” He held out his phone. “Use mine.”

John laughed. “Sometimes I wish I could. Did you know going from six hours a day of full-on exertion to an hour at the gym or a five-mile run doesn’t balance the billion calories I’m used to eating every day?”

“Funny, that.”

“I have to learn how to live like a real person again,” John mused. “Last time I did it, I was. . .six? I don’t think the same rules apply to a man of thirty-eight.”

“A brave new world for you, in that case.” Sherlock reached back over his head and elongated in a full-body stretch. “I wouldn’t know; I’m still gainfully employed, and very young.”

“Right,” John said, but kindly reserved further comment. “Looking forward to the game tonight. I love seeing you play.”

Sherlock pursed his lips, biting a smile.

“I anticipate a win; the New Jersey offense is in shambles currently, and our defense and goaltending are top-notch.”

“Speaking of which, we should shower up and dress; if you show up late on game night with me in tow, people are bound to talk.”

“People do little else,” Sherlock shrugged. “Anyway, I’ve no shame about shagging the man I’m in a relationship with. I doubt anyone would be shocked to learn we sleep together. I tend to think at least a handful of men in the organization are wanking to the idea fairly regularly.”

“Well, who wouldn’t? Look at you.”

“Look at _you_ ,” Sherlock growled. “Look at us together.”

“Now there’s an idea.” John shot him a wink, stood and soundly patted Sherlock’s thigh to get him moving. “Come on, then, shower’s waiting. I’ll let you wash my bollocks.”

“You do spoil me, John.”

 

The Demons got the puck away from Bouchard, and play headed back toward Sherlock. He set his stance, crouching and gliding forward of the line. It was still early in the second, 1 – 0 in favour of the Brawlers, but New Jersey was getting something going, working furiously to get the tying goal. Their star center and captain, Wes Ryan, a nine-season veteran, was tall and quick, with long strides that carried him with furious speed across the blue line and into the Brawlers’ defensive zone. His left wing had control, dangling near the top of the dot so Ryan and Marsden could set up a triangle and get some shots in before Boston’s D arrived to prevent them from scoring. Sherlock shifted to his glove side, anticipating a pass to Ryan and a wrist shot, probably top shelf.

Ryan crushed toward him like a moving wall, but just as he crossed the hashmarks, the Demons big centerman caught an edge and went down onto his side, unable to slow his forward momentum, sliding wildly across the ice. Sherlock knew what was coming and braced himself; despite expecting it, the loud, gunshot crack of Ryan’s shinbone hitting the metal goal post was shocking. Sherlock’s head felt light and he swallowed bile.

Play continued, so Sherlock had no choice but to check in and guard the house. Off to his left, Ryan tried repeatedly to stand—only to collapse onto the ice again and again—grunting and growling all the while. The Brawlers got the puck momentarily, the Demons turned it over, and lobbed one at him, but it went wide.

“Stay down. Your tibia is broken.”

Probably blind and deaf with pain—how he was still conscious was a mystery to Sherlock—Ryan tried once more to get to his feet, though his right leg would clearly not bear any weight, and he fell hard.

“It’s no use. Stay down,” Sherlock repeated. Ryan was on knees and elbows, with his head between his hands, snarling. He stayed down.

Kocur and one of the Demons’ forwards were struggling in the corner, and once Kocur got a stick on it, he mercifully fired the puck around the boards and away, icing it. The whistle blew and New Jersey’s team doctor came jogging out, holding the elbow of one of their wingers. Players gathered around, reassuring Ryan he was all right, though it was obvious he was not. Sherlock skated closer.

“Clearly nowhere near your heart,” he said, with unsentimental admiration, then skated back to the bench to wait for play to resume.


	8. Chapter 8

“Dying to see you tomorrow,” John confessed, and Sherlock watched as he settled himself onto a strange bed, though strange beds were at least as familiar to both of them as their own bed. John was one night ahead of Sherlock in the flat he’d rented in Hamilton for the two nights surrounding John’s number-retirement ceremony, while Sherlock was in a hotel suite in St Paul, having pocketed a win the previous night, 3 – 2 over the Green Bay Timberwolves, and waiting to play the St Paul Grizzlies the following night. John added, “I’ll meet you at the airport.”

Sherlock was pleased to think of John going out of his way to meet the team plane in the dead of night, but felt obliged to say, “No need.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Haven’t seen you in almost a week. You think I want to waste even an hour?”

Sherlock was deeply pleased.

“See, look at you. Giving yourself away,” John accused.

“I won’t deny I’m equally desperate to get to you.”

“Ah. Good.”

Sherlock had only forty minutes before the bus to the arena, and so decided to jump ahead to the good parts.

“So, safely assuming that your speeches and lunches and meetings on the west coast were productive and pleasant and that you were brilliant,” he began, “I feel I must ask whether you met anyone interesting.”

“Not particularly,” John replied, and his brow knitted a bit.

“After hours,” Sherlock clarified.

“Ah,” John said knowingly. “So it’s dirty video chat you’re after. And here I thought you were genuinely concerned about whether I had a good trip.”

“So you _did_ meet someone,” Sherlock carried on. “Tell me; I want to hear.”

John dirty-smiled and dragged his hand over his jaw. “Young, rough hands. Nice shoulders, chest. Thick dark hair and light brown eyes.”

Sherlock hummed and started unfastening his trousers, didn’t bother to get up and check the lock on his bedroom door.  “Not bad,” he said. “Continue.”

“Offered him a drink but he was good to go,” John said, his voice lowering as he settled into recounting the memory. “So we went up to the guest bedroom and he started to strip.”

“And you?”

“I watched him. He was already half-hard, nice cut cock, thick at the head. Hairy thighs.”

Sherlock massaged his bollocks, skimmed his fingertips along his length, teasing his prick closer to attention.

“And then what?” he asked.

“Before I knew which way was up, I was naked, flat on my back, holding my knees while he licked my arsehole,” John told him, and his tongue darted in and out between his own lips, a nervous tic that drove Sherlock half-mad, and had done since the first time they’d spoken.

“Lucky bugger,” Sherlock gusted.

“Him or me?”

“Both,” Sherlock replied. He wet his palm with his tongue, then said, “Tell me.”

“He licked me so slow, all the way up to my bollocks.” John’s eyes stayed closed, and the angle was strange—chin and nose, pursing and licking his lips—as he rested the bottom edge of his phone against his chest. Just as well, as Sherlock kept forgetting to frame his own face properly, more intent on sliding his hand in perfect tempo up and down along his cock. John’s voice brought his focus back to the telling of the tale. “His tongue was so wet, and he kept on stroking it over my hole, just licking and licking while my cock got harder and harder in his hand.”

“Did he finger you?” Sherlock wanted to know. He could imagine John’s hips rocking in time, the flex of his calves as he held his legs bent back at the knees.

“No, just ate my arse out until my cock was standing straight up, I was so hard. He loved it.” Watching John’s face was impossible; he jostled his phone so the camera could barely focus. Sherlock liked to hear him talk, liked imagining the scenario he described, and was even more turned on by the fact of John jacking off as he told it.

“ _You_ loved it,” Sherlock encouraged him. “Loved him licking you.”

John sucked a gasp, then sighed it out shakily. “I was half-mad by the time he finally started sucking my cock. So close so fast.”

“Like I’m getting now,” Sherlock told him, and it was true.

“Yeah? God, you’re gorgeous when you stroke yourself off.”

“Show me,” Sherlock panted. “Show me your hand on your prick.” John did as he was told, and Sherlock opened his eyes to take in the thrilling image of John’s surprisingly delicate fingers in a ring around his big cock, a squeezing slide from root to crown, dragging his foreskin over on the upstroke, then down again to expose the slick, dark-pink head. Sherlock cursed, and bit his lips. “I’d have fucked you,” he said, “Lick you, suck you, pin you there with your legs in the air, fuck you so hard. So hard.”

John half-shouted a curse.

“Love fucking you,” Sherlock barely gasped out, and then he was coming in harsh waves that made him shudder, his phone abandoned on the bed beside his shoulder, and he moaned, lost in the dream of driving himself between John’s upright thighs. The sounds John made during his own orgasm inspired a final quivering shudder through Sherlock’s body, and at last he fell limp against the mattress.

By the time Sherlock located his phone and lifted it to where it belonged, John’s face was once more visible on the screen, a sweetly stupid grin soft on his lips.

“Get to me, will you?” John demanded.

“Fast as I can. I’ve a game to win between now and then.”

“You will,” John told him, and Sherlock felt John’s certainty in his own chest.

 

Sherlock sat on his stool at the end of the visitors’ bench in the Canadian Airlines Centre during the pre-game ceremony retiring former Thrashers defenseman and captain John Watson’s number. All the Thrashers players wore their blue home jerseys, their own names replaced by _Watson_ , and every sweater emblazoned with a white 18.  Sherlock had been denied a request to wear the number, even during the pre-game festivities, and so had used white stick-tape on his chest protector to fashion his own 18, beneath his Brawlers’ jersey; perhaps an even better arrangement, as he could wear John’s number for the whole game.

A video was shown, of John’s career highlights—Sherlock was amused and a little heart-melted to see John in his early years, looking very much his young age of nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—and then followed speeches by Hamilton’s general manager and the coach under whom John had served longest, himself retired a few years previous. John stood by on the black carpet, wearing the Thrashers’ blue and white home sweater, and when the scoreboard flashed images of his face, it showed him alternating between a wide smile and blinking away tears he struggled to keep at bay. His sister Kim stood  beside him, also wearing a blue Thrashers jersey bearing number 18, and she frequently reached up to wipe her eyes with a series of crumpled tissues.

John at last took his spot behind the podium, and in a solid, steady voice, thanked the coaches and staff; his former teammates; the Thrashers organization; and especially the fans, who had always made playing in Hamilton a pleasure. To no surprise, the crowd applauded and cheered wildly for their old favourite, star player of many seasons, and the sound was positively deafening. John had often said the best thing about Thrashers fans was that they were so loud, and on his special night, they did not disappoint. His ten-minute speech was full of reminiscences, anecdotes, and friendly jokes about some of his long-term teammates. He was gracious about having had to go to the Brawlers to finally have his chance to raise the Cup, and lauded the organisation and players for making it happen.

“My dad was one of those hockey dads,” he said, as he finished up, “You know the type. He sacrificed a lot for me to keep playing, keep finding challenges, keep improving. He gave up his own dreams to play pro hockey, in order to support our family. He moved our family across an ocean to give me opportunities. My mother packed my lunches, kept my schedule, and made sure I kept up my grades in school—just in case.” There came a laugh, then, acknowledging that not every dreamer gets to the major league. “I’m told they’d have been proud of me, and I like to think that’s true.” He paused for applause in honour of his late parents. “What I know is true that there are two people I want to thank, above all. The first is my sister, Kim Watson, who has been beside me since the day she was born.” He turned toward her and his voice went thick as he told her, “I’m lucky to have you as my best friend.”

Kim pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, nodding, then threw him a smiling kiss.

Without skipping a beat, John shifted from addressing the crowd, and then his sister, to addressing Sherlock. He had to look backward over his shoulder to find Sherlock in the crowd, and once they’d fixed eyes on each other, John said, “And Sherlock Holmes, I’m lucky you’ve got my back.” Sherlock smiled at him, and winked, and John—clearly off script for just a moment, said, “I’ve got yours, too.”

John finished by once again thanking the Thrashers and the fans for the honour of retiring his number, then waited with Kim beside him as the banner bearing his name and number, and the dates of his years with the team, was brought forth with a flourish, rolled tight on its hanging rod. When it was raised and unfurled, the crowd somehow got even louder, and music played, and the GM was making the retirement of Thrashers’ 18 official though whatever he said was largely drowned out and ignored. The banner was affixed to wires and began its ascent to the rafters. John’s face fifty times its usual size, up on the scoreboard, was both smiling and tear-streaked. All players present banged their sticks on the ice, on the floor by the bench, on the boards in front of them, that unique form of applause. Sherlock stood—everyone stood—and he whistled and whooped with the best of them.

John was directed to exit the rink, the small crowd gathered on the rug for the ceremony leading and following him as he grinned and waved his thanks to the crowd, and Sherlock skated out the visitors’ door to meet him as he reached the Hamilton bench. The Brawlers poured over the bench and gathered around him—their former captain, too—to pat his shoulders and back, bump his knuckles with their own.

“Hey, what about that?” John exclaimed when Sherlock finally broke through the membrane of players’ bodies to reach him. He had to steady himself on Sherlock’s arm and lean close to his ear to be heard. Sherlock felt his hair being disarranged by the force of John’s breath.

“Not bad at all,” Sherlock replied. “Well deserved.” Sherlock had one hand resting on the back of John’s shoulder, a sort of embrace, not just to accommodate hearing each other. He glanced up and saw the two of them displayed on the scoreboard. “I think we’re on the kiss cam,” he joked, and pointed, tipping his head to draw John’s attention.

“Don’t know about that,” John smirked, and pulled a face. “You can slap my arse as I walk away, if you like.”

Sherlock knew it would be pushing the envelope to act on his instinct to grab his man’s face in his hands and plant a smacking kiss on his mouth, so only pulled him into a quick embrace made awkward by the extreme bulk of his chest protector and shoulder pads, then let him go. He did, in fact, give John’s arse a pat as he walked away.

John watched the game from the owners’ box with Kim; the Thrashers took it four to three, which certainly pleased him. For his part, though, Sherlock was annoyed with himself for letting one get-able puck go by him on the stick side, and his self-chastisement crowded out anything positive he might have thought about the rest of his performance: three perfectly legitimate goals against him, just the one bad one, and twenty-seven saves. He huffed and grunted his way through undressing, ditching his gear in a heap for the equipment manager to sort out and pack, but reminded himself it was John’s night, and so let the steam-heat of the shower slough away his residual layer of dark thought. By the time he was dressed and ready to show his face, he had all but shaken off the loss. Nothing a night in bed with John wouldn’t resolve.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a minor continuity error here, related to what day it is (I barely know what day it is, in real life!), which I will probably go back and fix in the previous chapter. Just in case you're one of those very careful readers, thought I'd let you know I'm aware.
> 
> Enjoy the smut!

John was waiting in a car for him once Sherlock was steered out of the arena, and greeted him with a bright expression and a warm kiss, one hand on Sherlock’s thigh and the other on his cheek.

“Kind of you to let them win,” John joked.

“Well, it’s only once in a lifetime your former team celebrates being rid of you once and for all. We took a poll in the dressing room and decided it was best to let you go out with a smile, given that you are now officially elderly and so near dea—”

John silenced him with another kiss, fiercer, hiding his amusement at being teased—not very well—in a show of his ongoing virility. Sherlock was more than willing to go along.

“Let’s not traumatise the driver,” Sherlock said at last, suppressing mischievous laughter and a semi-erection. He sat back but left his hand on John’s thigh, tracing mismatching circles with the tips of his fingers along John’s inseam.

“Are you feeling all right?” was John’s reply. Sherlock mugged insult at the implication he was perhaps sometimes less than discreet.

“Your sensibilities are rubbing off on me,” Sherlock told him with a shrug.

John’s voice lowered, growly and hot. “Talk about rubbing off on you.”

In contrast, Sherlock’s voice rose and leaned forward. “Quite quickly, please. Thank you.”

To his credit, the driver seemed relatively nonplussed by the flagrant, man-on-man action coming to a bubble in his back seat, though the rise of his eyebrows as his gaze met Sherlock’s in the rearview mirror seemed to hold at least a mild plea for mercy.

“In the hopes of surviving this drive without combusting,” Sherlock said, “Your sister—”

“God, no,” John protested with a groan, and sank back in his seat.

“Your sister was quite emotional. At least, that’s how it looked from where I was.”

“She was weepy off and on all night,” John confirmed. “At the appetizers-and-speeches thing before the game, too.”

“It must be gratifying to know she has such pride in your accomplishments,” Sherlock mused, grimly wondering what it must be like to have an engaged and supportive family.

“She’s the best,” John said. “I’m sure when the Brawlers retire twenty-two, your brother will be there, wiping his eyes with his monogrammed hanky.”

Sherlock snorted a laugh at the mental image of Mycroft Holmes in his Savile Row, double breasted three-piece, standing beside a bench full of spitting, cursing, fully-uniformed hockey players. He wouldn’t know whether to retreat from the imminent threat of bullying, or come in his likely-also-monogrammed silk boxers.

“Well, that line of discourse has proven effective,” Sherlock said, glancing at his lap. “For you as well?”

“Very much so.”

Sherlock’s hand on John’s thigh came to rest, and instead of teasing, merely held on. “You’re all right?” Sherlock asked.

John looked surprised, then grateful, to have been asked so pointedly about his potentially mixed feelings, rather than accepting yet more congratulations and thanks. Doubtless he’d deserved to be celebrated and honoured, and had been for the better part of the previous eight hours, by innumerable former teammates, coaches, and less intimate colleagues—not to mention the deafening, appreciative roar of the fans—but Sherlock well knew John’s transition away from playing hockey was still in its early stages. John was very much feeling his way through it, and not every day was it easy for him to find his way. Particularly since the season had started, Sherlock could see him struggling sometimes, despite being busy with other, newer things. John had spent his entire adult life in the routines, trials, and triumphs of a hockey player.

“Yeah,” John said, after a moment’s true consideration of Sherlock’s inquiry. “Yeah, I’m OK. I was thinking a lot today about the idea that no one else on the Thrashers will wear number eighteen, ever again. And tonight, looking up at the banners, and there’s so many guys who’ve been Thrashers over the years, and so few numbers up in the rafters. It really hit me what an honour that is.”

After a silent second, Sherlock prompted, “But. . .?”

“But it’s a loud and clear reminder that _I’ll_ never wear eighteen again, either.”

John nodded, comforting himself, set his jaw and frowned hard. Sherlock released his grip on his knee and found his hand, slotted their fingers together and squeezed.

“It’s difficult, I know.”

“Yeah.”

“No hurry.”

“Yeah.” John drew their entwined hands up and kissed the back of Sherlock’s wrist. “Yeah, I’m getting there. Thanks for asking.”

The car slowed, then pulled up alongside a curb in front of a glass and steel high-rise, and Sherlock seized the moment to resolve any lingering wistfulness and cue up the return of their deep need to be naked together at the soonest possible moment. “Is this the place? In the nick of time.”

“This is it. You’ll like it, I think.”

“Has a bed?”

“Yes,” John laughed. They made their way out of the car, thanked the driver and shook his hand.

“It’s perfect, in that case,” Sherlock said. John fumbled endlessly with the keypad, swatting away Sherlock’s assertive hands from his crotch, scolding, laughing, pressing wrong digits and making the thing buzz angrily and flash red.

“I only get three tries at this, and it’s really too cold for public sex in the shrubbery,” John admonished. Sherlock rubbed hard at his chest through layers of hockey jersey, dress shirt, and vest, trying to harden John’s nipples with brushing fingers.

 Sherlock intoned, “If you’re trying to dissuade me from public sex in the shrubbery, you’ll have to try harder.”

At last, blue light from beneath the keypad, and a welcoming triple-chirp, and John pulled the door handle before time ran out. Sherlock groped John through his trousers on the whole, long ride up in the elevator, even as John protested against the side of Sherlock’s throat that there was probably a security camera.

As he unlocked the door to their rented flat, John asked, “Oh—are you hungry?” He smirked, as if he was in any way willing to be put off from the promise of sex after so many days apart. “I could make you something.”

“Yes, make me,” Sherlock said decisively, and didn’t stop to hang his coat but rather left it in a heap on the floor where he’d let it fall from his shoulders. “Make me. . . _something_.”

John stepped into Sherlock’s space and ran a hand down his shirtfront. “Oh, is that how it is, pretty boy?” One eyebrow rose above his mischievous gaze. He pressed a palm against the center of Sherlock’s chest and gave a gentle, insistent push. “To my room, then,” he demanded, tipping up his chin to direct Sherlock backward. “I think I deserve some of your attention.”

Sherlock, dirty-smiling, let himself be guided. John was firm-jawed and his voice was low and rough in a way Sherlock relished; their dynamic had a beautiful fluidity, crests and troughs of give and take, but now and then he found just this sort of dramatic imbalance—a stormy and sudden fifty-foot wave that put them both off their feet a bit—was a welcome curiosity. By the time he’d been backed into the bedroom, Sherlock was willingly pliant and thrilled with imagination of what might unfold.

Sherlock moved to unfasten his shirt buttons, but John stopped him with a sharp, “ _Uh!_ I like you dressed like this,” he said, and ran his hands over Sherlock’s bicep through his suit jacket and shirt. “Maybe take this off,” he allowed, and with nimble finger and thumb slipped loose the single button, then pressed his hands over Sherlock’s shoulders and guided the jacket off them, sliding until it fell. John quickly swept it aside with his foot, a ruffian gesture that stole Sherlock’s breath. One hand pulled him forward by a hand tucked into the front of his trousers while the other found his nipple and plumped and tightened it through his shirt. “Pretty, pretty, _pretty_ boy,” John murmured at him, an almost-cooing contemplation; Sherlock sighed, and wanted. “Pretty lips,” John whispered, and dragged them apart with the downward drag of a thumb Sherlock chased with his tongue-tip.

“Let me,” Sherlock muttered, a bit of a plea in it, and reached for John’s trousers-front, fumbling for the zip. He licked his lips and before he’d drawn his tongue fully inside his mouth, John was kissing him, clutching and shoving so they both semi-stumbled, and they smiled against each other’s mouths, then sank back into the heat of the moment. Sherlock lay on his back with John caging him at hip and shoulder, hovering above and looking up and down the length of him with unapologetic appraisal in his gaze.

Another hungry kiss, and Sherlock’s prick was already straining against the front placket of his trousers, and their breath came hotter, and John scraped teeth against Sherlock’s jaw before rolling away to make room to undress. As he opened all the too-many buttons of his own suit and shirt, John stood by the edge of the bed, staring possessively as Sherlock ran his hands down his chest, adjusted his erection—which only made it worse—or better—aching more—flooding hot—and John hummed encouragement enough that Sherlock opened the zip and the hook, pressing the edges of the fabric back and drawing out just his cock from inside.

In no time John’s knees were beside his head, and Sherlock’s chin tilted up and back, sliding his body down the bed to find the angle, while John gripped the ( _could not have designed it better myself!_ ) sleek but sturdy headboard, and leaned his arse into Sherlock’s waiting hands, spreading him open so Sherlock could lick and suck and hum against his hole, up and down as much of the slit of John’s lovely, muscley bum as he could get to. Sherlock jostled and pulled with gripping palms and fingers, and John rocked and wriggled, and everything was wet and dark and dirty and delicious. Sherlock’s cock twitched and jumped with need for stimulation; he thrust against nothing, hips rolling in time with the motion of his tongue.

John cursed and praised. “Fuck! Oh, you pretty boy, lick me. Lick me. Yes. _Fuck!_ ” and Sherlock worked one hand close to his open lips, and his chin, all wet with running saliva he slathered over John’s hole with a lapping, flicking tongue. Inched in a finger. Licked it. Sucked. Turned it and pressed and turned it another way, went on licking all around it, and John let out a shuddering moan that pleased Sherlock deeply.

Despite Sherlock’s willingness to have John sit on his face the whole night if it pleased him—and given the grunts, sighs, and curses streaming from John’s mouth, it seemed to—soon enough John rearranged them so he was kneeling between Sherlock’s wide-spread thighs, running hands up the lengths of them, massaging Sherlock’s quadriceps muscles through the rough silk of his trousers. At last he took Sherlock’s prick in his mouth, not deep but sucking hard, licking wet spirals around Sherlock’s crown, nodding and humming and— _dear god_ —staring up open-eyed to meet Sherlock’s gaze, and Sherlock held out as long as he could, then a moment longer, and John drew back to finish him by hand, watching intently as Sherlock’s cum left wet ribbons across his shirt where it disappeared into his trousers’ waist, and on the turned-back zipper placket open just enough to expose his pink prick.

John, still dressed in his pale blue dress shirt and tugged-loose Thrashers’ blue necktie, maneuvered Sherlock’s legs where he wanted them, and knelt astride Sherlock’s upper thighs. Sherlock tugged his shirttails aside to watch John stroking himself, his swollen bollocks nudging up against Sherlock’s spent and softening cock.

“ _Mm_ , pretty boy,” he moaned, and reached for Sherlock’s hand, twining their fingers, gripping tight as his other hand worked furiously along his length. “Gonna come all _over_ you. . .”

“Yes. Do it.”

“All— _oh_ —over you.”

And then he was coming, thick pulses that crisscrossed the soaked-in stains of Sherlock’s own spunk on the front of his shirt. John shivered and dropped his head back, and Sherlock worked the pad of his thumb in firm, massaging circles over the back of John’s thumb, their hands still clutched tight together and resting on John’s thigh.

Once he’d recovered, John stretched out beside him and Sherlock rolled toward him, and they nuzzled each other’s faces, quick-kissing now and then, kept at it for long minutes, basking in the glow of no one having to make excuses to get up and leave. Even in yet another strange bed, in another strange room, in a flat that held none of their things—no memories of them—Sherlock was acutely aware they were precisely where they belonged.

“Shower?” John asked at last, quietly, and Sherlock’s response was a noncommittal hum and a shrug. “Time’s it?” John leaned up to look for a clock on the bedside table. “Nearly one. Probably too late to order food. Are you hungry?”

Sherlock shook his head, traced the shape of John’s pectoral muscles, then began lazily picking apart his shirt buttons. His man was so gorgeous, so brilliant and talented, that  twenty-three thousand people had spent the evening applauding him. Screaming. Sherlock didn’t blame them a bit.

John’s face rumpled in that affectionate way it sometimes did, all the best lines in his face appearing as he grinned at Sherlock. He tugged at Sherlock’s trousers. “Let’s get naked,” he suggested, no growl in it at all, “And c’mere. Just come here close to me, _ma moitié_.”

Sherlock could find no fault.


	10. Chapter 10

“Eleven minutes left in the second, and New York’s Avengers lead the Boston Brawlers by a punishing five goals to two. During the TV timeout we saw motion on the bench indicating a goalie switch, and now Anthony LoPresti is doing some quick warm-ups in front of the net as we wait for play to resume. What do you think, Brick? Right call on the part of head coach Greg Lestrade?”

“I think after letting five get by in the first half of the game, at least two of which were possible saves, it looks like Sherlock Holmes is having an off night, so, yeah, it was the right—the only—move for Greg Lestrade to pull him off the ice, try to recover this hockey game for Boston. There’s still plenty of time to win it, and Brawlers offense has been looking decent despite the chaos in their own defensive end, so a fresh goaltender just might make the difference here, at least giving the B’s a chance to catch the Avengers. If LoPresti can hold them off, the Brawlers could at least tie it up in regulation to force overtime, if not win it outright.”

“The centers meet on the Avengers’ logo for a faceoff. Bouchard wins it; he has a seventy-four percentage so far this season, so that’s no great surprise. Brawlers passing through triangles, Thurston makes a wrist shot, turned away by Borachev, and Dylan Hitchens swoops in to pick up the rebound. Hitchens and Lassiter passing tape to tape, back to Hitchens, they ease through the neutral zone, Bouchard gives Hitchens some hassle but can’t get the puck away. Pass to Jarlssen for the one-timer, save by LoPresti, and he smothers the puck.”

Sherlock sat stone-faced on the stool, staring at LoPresti in goal even when play moved to the far end. He seethed with self-recrimination. In his younger years he may have put on a show of anger, smashing his stick against the boards on his way through the door or shouting curses at the ref and linesmen for not making calls against the Brawlers’ opponents that might have changed the pace and mood of the game. But displays of extreme, personal emotion were not the Brawlers’ way. You did your job, and if you sucked at it, you sat your arse down and let someone else take over, for the good of the team. No complaining. No tantrums.

Mentally replaying his nearly thirty minutes in goal, Sherlock recognised he’d been caught with his hand in his pants a couple times, his concentration lacking. He just hadn’t checked in, right from the start, and once he fell into the groove of attending less than a hundred percent, he just couldn’t bring himself back to center. Easily save-able goals should not get by Sherlock Holmes, when he was playing his game. He needed more sleep the night before a game. He needed to eat a lighter meal. He needed to sit in a corner somewhere with his face to the wall, close his eyes, and gather himself.

Sherlock sat back, hid his I’ll-be-damned, “Hunh,” with a downward tilt of his head, using the bill of his ball cap to shadow his face. Years back, when he first got clean, he’d relied on meditation, self-talk, his mantra,  intent on breathing in, then breathing out—with purpose and attention—to keep him grounded. The habits had faded over time, replaced with other, less time- and focus-consuming rituals. Equipment checks. Waiting by the dressing room door to lead the team up the tunnel. Roughing up his crease and banging his stick against the posts. Knowing as he did that everything is as it should be, Sherlock recognised that absently adding a few minutes just breathing to his mental list of to-do’s was not idle mind-chatter. He was giving himself advice. Worth a try, if it could help straighten up his game. He’d make time for it.

In the end, LoPresti couldn’t rescue them from trailing, and the Brawlers posted a humiliating 8 – 3 loss.

 

At last, three consecutive days—two of them a weekend—at home together in their flat, and Sherlock was determined to make the most of it. He met John for dinner at the place where they’d had their first date (though John had not known it was a date until months later) on Friday night, and ordered wines to match all three courses.

“Carolina tomorrow night,” John said between mouthfuls of citrus tart, bright with mandarin and yuzu, prettied up with a dusting of icing sugar and a mountain of ginger-flavoured whipped cream. “What d’you reckon?”

“Coach is holding off on whether I’ll start.”

John frowned. “What’s that about? Couple of bad games? You’re hardly the only one to carry the blame. The second and third lines were looking incredibly sloppy on Tuesday.”

“LoPresti has five wins in five starts this season; his stats look better.”

“Oh, come on,” John scoffed. “You have to weight it.”

“Even so. I started hot, but the past couple weeks have been uneven, at best.”

“Don’t be harsh.”

“Harsh? I thought ‘uneven’ was too kind.” Sherlock didn’t want to ruin their evening with self-pity and discouragement, and longed to change the subject. “How was your session with Iain? I liked the most recent version of your speech, with the new section about playing in England before moving to Canada.”

John would not be so easily dissuaded from building Sherlock up, and ranted his scorn for the coach’s choices, the team’s play, and the strange schedule the league had set up for the Brawlers during October and November, not a single week with the usual Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday routine in place. All to accommodate—what?—the television schedule? Ridiculous; no wonder you guys are off your game, with two weekend matinees and an eight o’clock start on Wednesday all in the same week?

Kind of him not to say Sherlock was off his game, but instead to throw every man on the roster under the team bus.

John carried on a mild harangue all the way through dessert, only changing the topic when they decided to skip the cheese plate in favour of getting home to their bed that much sooner. Sherlock was only mildly disappointed he would not get to sample the Australian syrah he’d already determined would be best suited to the kinds of cheeses usually served in late autumn. Doubtless he’d get over it, and soon.

Later, still before midnight but after they’d let time pass to digest their meal, John on his phone, typing with his thumbs and occasionally grunting a light laugh at whatever he was reading in response while Sherlock bundled a cloth bag full of their dirty pants, socks, and workout gear and set it out on the landing to be picked up by the laundry in the morning.

“What’s funny?” he asked, as John let go another low-volume _ha!_ directed at his phone’s screen.

“Iain disagrees with you about that section of my speech you said you liked. He wants to cut it. And about half of the next section, as well. Apparently my youth is less interesting than I thought.”

Sherlock began unbuttoning his shirt cuffs. “What does he know? He’s only a professional speech writer,” he snarked. “You’re the expert on your own life story, and where the good bits are in it.”

Sherlock crouched behind John’s armchair, cheek to cheek, hands sliding down John’s shoulders until he could pluck the phone from his hand—John mugged outrage and said, “Hey!”—and set it on the side table, then left a hot streak of kisses from the notch beneath his earlobe to the edge of his shirt collar. John’s hand on the back of his neck massaged lightly, with more affection than heat. Sherlock arched and stretched beneath the touch, a cat leaning into the stroke of a hand.

“Take me to bed,” Sherlock whispered, a breath against the shell of John’s ear. John hummed a low growl, rose and caught Sherlock by the loosened cuff of his shirt, pulled him toward their bedroom.

Minutes later they lay naked, face to face, and Sherlock’s fingertips whisper-roamed over John’s body while John stroked him—their arrangement a horizontal echo of so many standing hand jobs in public restrooms and dark nightclub corners with men whose names Sherlock instantly forgot, or never knew in the first place. John muttered at him that he was _so hot, gorgeous, making me crazy_ , all things he’d heard before yet never tired of. Indeed, there was all of everything he’d always enjoyed while on the prowl for hookups, but on a comfortable bed, with the lights on. John was his perfect partner—horny and game, hard and hot, handling Sherlock’s prick selfishly, as if making Sherlock come was all he needed or wanted—and Sherlock found he didn’t need, want, or even think about having anyone else when they were together.

To crown it all with glory, Sherlock could kiss him, and did, taking John’s jaw in both hands and smothering his sex-talk with a deep and dirty kiss, licking his tongue, shuddering as John found the perfect tempo and pressure. Sherlock groaned against the corner of John’s mouth, and John’s hips bucked, smearing sticky pre-cum onto Sherlock’s skin.

Sherlock encouraged him, nodding, kissing, low-moaning as his cock swelled and his bollocks tightened and he fucked into John’s sliding fist, coming in hot waves, sucking John’s lower lip between his own, pulling until it slipped away from him. He shoved John onto his back, yanked away the blankets to look down the length of him, spit-slicked his palm and fingers to stroke John to his well-deserved finish. It was remarkably pleasing to see him nude, skin over muscle, golden hair in all the right places, the quiver of his belly and the tightening of his thighs. The way his toes curled and spread. His face.

They lay side by side, breath quieting, with their wrists touching, and Sherlock felt as gratified and satisfied as ever he had with some tall, short, clean-shaven, hairy, dark, pale stranger with a moniker like PapaBear or TwinkyBoy. All that, and kissing, too. Evidence Sherlock was capable of making good choices.

John rolled and kissed him in the hollow between neck and shoulder. Sherlock was steadily sliding into sleep. Smiling.

 

It was already close to noon on Saturday when Sherlock finally got a text from Coach Lestrade confirming his suspicions. Nothing more to it than _LoPresti will start tonight_. No reason given, no _see me in my office at three_ , nothing. Sherlock reminded himself it was just business, and since LoPresti was hot, it was only to the team’s benefit to let him get in a couple starts, earn his pay, see how he did under pressure against a couple of the league’s best teams—the Brawlers’ schedule was loaded with them in the next several games—but Sherlock couldn’t help but check whether the text was to him, or to the team at large (the former), and to wonder if he should register a protest or just keep his mouth shut (the latter, though it would be difficult).

John fixed them lunch from what he could find on-hand, which wasn’t much because their landlady Mrs Hudson had recently spent two nights in the hospital getting treated for pneumonia. They’d sent flowers and as John dictated what Sherlock should put on the card, the two half-joked that they should probably not rely so heavily on her habit of stocking their kitchen during Brawlers road trips. Sherlock suggested John arrange grocery deliveries; John fired back that he did, actually, work all week even when Sherlock was not there to see it. Apologies and forgiveness were quickly exchanged, but the issue of who would fill the fridge was left unresolved.

“You’ll ride in with me,” Sherlock said, laying out his shirt and suit on the bed, going into the chest for socks.

“Actually, not tonight. I’m meeting Iain at the Causeway before the game. Grab some food, try to bang out these last edits on the long version of the speech. I’m bringing him to the game tonight.”

Sherlock fixed his eyes on John, still wrapped at the waist in a towel after the shower they’d shared, and with a deliberate, scanning gaze, silently laid claim to every inch of him from golden-blonde fringe to bare, stubby toes.

“You’re not jealous,” John chided.

“Is he straight?”

“Fuck off.” John was smiling. Sherlock had an odd, burning sensation low in the center of his chest.

“What’s his background? Sports reporting?”

“He teaches creative writing at Emerson. This is his side-gig; they don’t pay academics a living wage anymore.” John draped the towel over the corner of the bed and Sherlock looked his fill of his muscular bum and thighs as he went into a drawer for clean pants.

“What kind of creative writing?”

“Not sure. I think poetry. He also teaches two literature courses—I know that for sure.”

Sherlock hummed through pursed lips, putting on a display of insecure possessiveness he did not actually feel. After a moment he said, “Propose a three-way with your poet; it’s been a while since we’ve done that.”

“Ah, so you’re not jealous,” John nodded knowingly. “You’re bored.”

Sherlock sniffed. “Not a bit; we’ve got at least a hundred and fifty items left on that list of things you wanted us to do together. In any event, addicts aren’t allowed to be bored.”

“No?”

“Using is too simple a remedy. Boredom leads to temptation and then, too often, to relapse.”

“Makes sense. But with your one-and-done rule, and me having to keep working with him,” John smirked, “A threesome seems like it could be more complicating than we’d like.” He drew his pants up to his waist and snapped the waistband into place atop his hipbones. With a shrug he added, “But I’ll ask him. See what he says.”

“You won’t,” Sherlock asserted.

“Well, not outright. I’m a bit smoother than that. You should know.”

“We’ll have a drink after the game. I’ll ask him.”

“I just might let you,” John said, in a tone that might be serious or joking, and then kissed Sherlock on the cheek as he passed.


	11. Chapter 11

Sunday brunch comprised Sherlock on his back and John hovering above, first trading teasing blowjobs back and forth, each bringing the other partway along before stopping to breathe, then losing his breath as the favour was returned. They generated a steadily-rising tension, no cresting and subsiding waves, only building and building, and by the time John replaced two probing fingers with the thick length of his cock, both were sweaty, cursing, clutching, desperate.

Sherlock spasmed with pleasure—a body-long shudder from taut shoulders to splaying toes—and he hovered at the precipice, wanting to succumb, wanting to linger there on the edge. He held his eyes shut, knowing that to see John’s hard-edged, gasping face; his exertions evident in his expression; the way he would suck in his bottom lip and bite it—to see all of that—any of that—would certainly end him. He was so close, _so close_ , so very nearly there but not, and it was exquisite torment to stay suspended there, weightless with ecstasy, so soon to fall and crash and melt in a pool of warm bliss. Soft-boned and languid. That oozing moment-after. That wash of peace.

But of course, inevitably, despite his best intentions not to, Sherlock opened his eyes. John was just as Sherlock knew he would be: straining, moaning, open-mouthed and utterly unguarded.

“No, _oh_. . .” Sherlock groaned as he came, hot and messy onto his own low belly, his every vein singing hot with a thrumming rush of blood, his heart thudding, gooseflesh rising on his arms.

John near-shouted, urging him on, “Yes, _Sherlock_ , fuck yes,” and he picked up his pace, urgent shoving, relentless. “You feel so good. I love fucking you.”

Sherlock lay limp, muscles madly shivering, and he managed a sloppy-soft smile, but his mouth was too dry to speak. John’s rhythm shattered apart, holding himself taut and close to Sherlock’s chest with one hand on Sherlock’s shoulder, the other clasping his thigh. Sherlock relished the ragged heat of John’s breath in stuttering gasps across Sherlock’s neck and chest as he came, cursing, sucking air, and Sherlock managed to wind his limp arms around John’s back, then dug in his heel to put a gentle roll in his hips. John let out a deep sigh, and his shoulders shook. Sherlock thought of these little aftershocks as their concerto’s coda.

“All right?” John asked him, knowing the answer, grinning against Sherlock’s jaw and cheek between scattered kisses.

“Can’t speak, dying. Died. Dead already.”

“I’ll accept that in place of _all right_.”

They disentangled, wiped away the leavings, stretched and hummed luxuriously. John’s fingers teased into and out of Sherlock’s hairline, leaning up on his elbow at Sherlock’s side.

“I can see now,” John mused, “that a Sunday morning lie-in was a meaningless phrase before I had an actual five day work week.”

Sherlock thought this over, then made a noise of affirmation. John’s fingers in his hair sent tendrils of tingles across his scalp, threatening to lull him back to sleep. “How many days did you work before?” he asked softly, and John laughed, probably thinking it was half-asleep gibberish.

“Some people would say three,” John told him, and traced the perimeter of his face from brow to cheek to chin, then up around the other side. “I’d say seven.”

“Seven,” Sherlock agreed.

“You’ve work today?”

No game, no practice, no travel. Still lingering in bed at half-twelve. Nothing at all required of him beyond meeting his body’s basic needs: food and sex, three times each. At least.

“No,” Sherlock murmured, and John went back to caressing and arranging the waves of hair no doubt running wild across his forehead.

“Good,” John said, quiet, soothing, and though no time passed, at once Sherlock became aware of sounds in the kitchen, cutlery and the taps, stoneware plates set on butcher block worktops. The television or radio. But no, John was talking back to it. Laughing, but quietly.

Sherlock re-erected himself into some semblance of an upright man, putting a long arc in his spine as he stretched his arms overhead. There were flakes of his cum on his belly that pulled at fine hairs, a somewhat disgusting reminder of a rather good time. His phone told him it was nearly two o’clock. Shower. Shave. John was fixing them something to eat and Sherlock was ravenous.

“Good sleep, _moitié?”_ John, with that smile of his, looking elder-hipster-handsome in slim blacker-than-black jeans and a horizontal striped shirt—maroon and beige, he had seven or eight of the same in various colourways—flat basketball trainers with a star on the inside ankle.

“Ludicrous but perhaps necessary,” Sherlock replied, and they danced around each other as Sherlock went for the kettle and John plated takeaway sushi from the organic supermarket, irreverently accompanied by cranberry and pecan-studded bread rolls with butter, and two ginger beers in brown glass bottles—a real bachelors’ feast.

“Poor sleep last night?” John asked as the two assumed their usual dining chairs and tucked in.

“A bit. Woke for an hour or so in the middle.”

John frowned, looked like he wanted to say the correct one of at least three different things. Sherlock knew he would get it wrong, so put him out of his misery before he spoke again.

“I could have had as good a night as LoPresti had,” Sherlock told him. “It just wasn’t my start.”

“True enough. He’s hot right now; why not let him do the work?” John shrugged, as if a few days in a ball cap on the bench was a minibreak Sherlock should enjoy rather than a punishing frustration.

“I don’t excel at filling up empty hours, you’ll recall,” Sherlock reminded.

“So how will you handle it?” John asked.

Sherlock wished for something to eat that wasn’t soft and easy; he needed to gnash his teeth.

“More practice time. Maybe get Bouchard or Mellon to meet me off-hours.”

John’s face brightened; he approved. “Thurty would do it.”

“You’re probably right,” Sherlock allowed. Only slightly changing the subject, he added, “I’ve been thinking about meditation.”

“Oh?”

“Years ago, it was part of my pre-game routine. Just two or three minutes to quiet my head. Get centered.”

“Helped?” John reached across and speared Sherlock’s smoked eel, thrust it to his mouth and finished it in two bites. He offered shrimp tempura roll as an apology but Sherlock waved it off, feeling anything batter-fried rather negated the entire point of sushi, which was to provide a meal more nutritious than pizza or fast food burgers.

“It’s difficult to quantify,” Sherlock replied. “I was freshly sprung from rehab and needed all the crutches I could find. Certainly it didn’t hurt.”

“Worth a try, then. If you’re feeling, you know.” It was clear John still held a pro hockey player’s full complement of superstition; he was hesitant to utter a word anywhere close to what both of them were—silently, in the back of their minds—worried about. Just slightly worried. It was too early to name it. And the fear of it could bring it on—any fool knew that—so it was better to never let the thought enter one’s mind in the first place. Don’t invite the vampire to cross the threshold. Don’t speak of the devil, lest he appear. And don’t, for god’s sake, ever suggest you or someone on your team might be showing signs of—

“I’m _feeling_ just fine,” Sherlock said firmly.

“Yeah, no, I know.”

“LoPresti’s on fire, as you said.”

“Yep.”

“No need this early in the season to make a fuss about not getting enough starts. I’ve got over eight hundred starts, career-long. Missing a handful is nothing to—”

“No, I know. I know.”

John made a gesture of surrender and took a long draught of his ginger beer, doubtless to stop himself speaking further, which Sherlock felt was both wise of him, and kind.

“It’s the Generals Tuesday. Offense packed with left-hand shots. Not LoPresti’s specialty,” Sherlock said.

“Yeah, he has a hard time seeing those,” John agreed.

“In the meantime,” Sherlock said, brushing his hands together to clean them of crumbs and sweep away tension, “I’ll text Thurston and see if he’s free tomorrow for a shoot-around.”

“Great.” John started clearing plates and bottles, crumpled paper napkins. “I was thinking maybe a movie?” he asked, mercifully changing the subject, offering Sherlock a few hours to focus his thoughts elsewhere. “There’s that new horror one, with an actual rubber-suit monster instead of just people pulling each other’s thumbnails out with pliers. At the Common; we can even run over and back if you want to get some conditioning in.”

“Never a bad idea,” Sherlock said, by way of agreement. He smirked. “So you should leave ten minutes before me, to arrive at the same time.”

“Very funny,” John chided. “You’re funny.” He ditched the plates and forks in the sink, drew out his phone to buy their tickets. One thing Sherlock decidedly did not need just then was John worrying over him. Doubting him. That much, Sherlock could handle all on his own.

 

_“Welcome back to the Nationwide Bank Arena here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for BSN’s coverage of tonight’s matchup of the Boston Brawlers against the Milwaukee Muskies. Starting goaltenders brought to you by Newbury Comics, a wicked good time!”_

Sherlock roughed up his crease, moved quickly east to west, setting himself as if to stop or catch pucks every few inches until he’d made six imaginary saves: wrist shot, backhand, slap shot; wrist shot, backhand, slap shot.

_“Back in goal tonight is veteran Brawlers’ netminder Sherlock Holmes, with a thirty-four, twenty-two, and nine record against the Muskies in the regular season—that’s notable for his being undefeated here at home against this Milwaukee team.”_

_“Right, Jack. Holmes just seems to have Milwaukee’s number, or at least he has up to this point. This season Milwaukee is rolling five new forwards—two rookies up from their farm team in Louisville, and three guys they got in trades during the off-season—so their offense is looking pretty different, especially in the second and third lines—and it’ll be interesting to see if Holmes is able to maintain his record at home against this team, facing some unknown quantities.”_

Stick against the posts, a few tosses of his head to make his neck pop, a forward glide and a backward slotting-in. Sherlock looked at the snow built up between his feet, the haze of blue paint beneath, then up.

_“The puck drops and the game is on. . .”_

Sherlock ducked to receive helmet-bumps, got a few solid shakes and thumps square on top, where the rose-eyed skull was painted on the roof of his mask. He didn’t smile, but that was not much new. Down the tunnel, into the room, and once he’d shaken his hands free of blocker and glove, and ditched his mask on the bench in front of his locker, he went into his duffel for his phone.

 _TXT from JW: Brilliant win. Well done_.

Sherlock let himself grin, just a bit, for a fleeting half-second, then tapped his reply.

 _As it should be. See you back at home on Sunday_.

 

To add insult to the injury of arrival in sub-zero Chicago at two in the morning, the team were informed once they’d boarded the bus that they would be in double rooms instead of suites. Sherlock hoped George was not a snorer.

Once in the room, Sherlock went straight to the bathroom, cleaned his teeth, then edge-sat against the sink to text John.

 _Alive in Chicago. Cozy two-bed room with George_.

He longed for a jokey reply from John, reminding Sherlock of their first encounter in similarly cramped quarters, warning him not to repeat it, or perhaps suggesting he do so. Sherlock felt his need to get off as an irritation beneath the skin. His head was loading up a Technicolor slideshow of bodies in motion, accompanied by a symphony of curses, commands, deep-voiced growling. It was the middle of the night. Tuesday. No clubs or bars open. He checked CRUZR and found a paltry number of illuminated blue dots on the local map; none within a half-hour’s journey by a car he’d have to summon and wait for. John at home, asleep, unavailable by voice or video.

There was always porn. He wouldn’t need much time. It would help drain off the last of his adrenaline, and a solo orgasm was better than none. He tapped and swiped, muted the sound, opened his trousers and looked around for anything slippery. He was already stroking his prick with a coating of perfumey body lotion from a tiny plastic bottle—hotels should stock lubricant, he’d often thought, but then, he would—by the time he even looked at the phone’s screen to see what video he’d landed on. A three-way, outdoors, all of them wearing thick cableknit socks and lumberjack boots. Sherlock set aside curiosity about how they got their jeans off without taking off the boots, and kept his attention on setting a pace to bring himself off quickly.

He thought of a real threesome he and John had had with a twinky waiter in Seattle, of John watching him giving head—not unlike this one in the video, chin wet, swallowing impossibly deep. Imagined that instead of watching him, John had urged him onto all fours as the muscle queen was doing to the lanky one, teasing Sherlock’s hole that way, with his prick—nearly that long, just that thick—rubbing it along the cleft to tease him with promises of more to come. Sherlock rolled his palm over the head of his prick, licked his lips, envisioned himself with a cock in his mouth, deep in, holding his tongue down. John’s cock wet with slick, pressing hard to force Sherlock open, slow and steady, holding his hip. John’s fingers curling into the flesh at the top of Sherlock’s thigh, pulling his hips back where he wanted him. Sherlock sucking, licking, and John fucking, fucking. . .

“Fuck it, Holmes, what are you—jerking off in there?” George was annoyed; perhaps it was not just Sherlock who needed a few minutes with some hand lotion and a dirty movie playing soundlessly on a screen the size of an index card.

He paused just long enough to shout back, “I am, as a matter of fact. Fuck off with the noise so I can finish.”

There was a grumbling response not really meant for him to hear, exasperation and disgust evident in George’s tone despite the indecipherability of his words.

No longer dependent on the visuals, Sherlock leaned hard on the edge of the sink, curled his back and neck, closed his eyes. John giving his arse a sound smack. Then another. Then clutching Sherlock’s hips with both of his strong hands, pulling Sherlock back and down onto his prick. The hot slide, how full he would feel, how thoroughly fucked. John shoving his palm against the back of Sherlock’s head, forcing some hot stranger’s cock deep into Sherlock’s throat, fucking, oh and fucking, and _ohhh. ._ .

He bit back noise, huffing air hard through his nostrils and then his open, silent mouth as he came, cum shiny and nearly the same shade of white as the marble of the floor it streaked. He panted away the last of it, felt the welcome softening of every adrenalised muscle. The quieting of his ever-racing mind to something like a dull howl, at least low-key enough to let him fall asleep. Optional morning skate. Maybe he’d go. Rather than fastening his trousers, he stripped off all but his boxer-briefs, tossed a hand towel at the mess on the floor and smeared it with his foot. Using dexterous toes to save him bending over, he deposited the towel in the tub.

Out in the room, there were clues to George’s before-bed ritual. On the desk, an empty vodka shot and the bottle of beer that had chased it, no longer empty as George had made do while the bathroom was occupied. His phone facedown on the bed beside him. Hood of his sweatshirt tight-strung around his face, to cover his eyes and block out the light. On his side table, a rip-stop nylon shaving bag, battered, overstuffed and unzipped. Sherlock purposely turned his face away from whatever contents might be visible as he reached across to shut off the lamp. Dropped his pants to his ankles and stepped out of them, slid between deliciously cold sheets, fell into sleep still waiting for warmth.


	12. Chapter 12

Sherlock and John kept missing each other, strings of unanswered texts, poorly-timed voicemails, and missed calls. John was forever in meetings and had a habit Sherlock found loathsome, of silencing his phone and placing it screen-down on the table in front of him. He texted while Sherlock was at the gym. Called while Sherlock was at practice. Attempted video chat when Sherlock was in meetings of his own, upright in dark corners of nightclubs or reclining open-thighed on a handed-down futon sofa in a half-step-up-from-student flat.

Sherlock started the game in Chicago and the Mavericks got one by him in the first forty seconds. Less than two minutes later, another. He held them off the rest of the night, but it was a slog, and the Brawlers’ offense couldn’t penetrate. They left Chicago with another in the loss column.

The weekend was back-to-back matinees, one in Knoxville and then another in Charlotte. The Brawlers got their lunch eaten in a 4 – 0 shutout on Saturday.

 _TXT from Coach: LoPresti will start this afternoon. Come to my office tomorrow, 8:30_.

Sherlock bought overpriced, noise-canceling headphones at the airport to tune out his teammates’ poker game chatter during the flight back to Boston. LoPresti had started; the Brawlers had won. The sun was setting as they landed. Sherlock wondered if he was coming down with something; his stomach felt wobbly and off-kilter.

John was waiting by the baggage carousel, and Sherlock walked straight to him so that John had no choice but to embrace him; Sherlock held fast and breathed a slow, conscious breath against John’s chest. In. And out.

“Hey,” John said softly, so many creases in his brow as he looked up, searching Sherlock’s face. It was inquiry, greeting, and comforting noise in equal measures. Sherlock took the easy way out.

“Hey, yourself. What’s for dinner?”

John looked hesitant but quickly chose to go along. “I bought some lamb chops. Don’t know how to cook them but I imagine you do, or can find out how and do brilliantly at it.”

“I know just the wine for it,” Sherlock told him, and John dragged his bag off the carousel. They pawed at each other, below the level of the hire-driver’s rearview, all the way back to the flat.

By the time they’d had quick and noisy reunion sex; seared and oven-baked the chops; made a quick mint pesto and a risotto tarted up with spinach, lemon, and feta cheese; stuffed themselves; and fallen into bed with John’s laptop between them to watch a crime documentary about an imposter who was obvious to everyone but the mother and siblings of the long-lost loved one he pretended to be, it was half past midnight and Sherlock was struggling against sleep. For no other reason than that he was back with John, cocooned in their sometimes-smelly, clutter-riddled love nest, and for him to fall asleep meant morning must come. Morning meant reporting to the coach’s office for a dressing down or, worse, a “we’re all here for you; what’s going on?” sympathetic faux-therapy session.

Just as he was sinking into the plot of the film, eyes half-closed and heavy, John stirred him up with the simple inquiry, “What’s your day like tomorrow?”

Sherlock sighed, laughing at himself being caught out in his attempt at denial. John paused the film and looked at him, lifting his eyebrows in expectation of a respons. Generously, he offered, “I have nothing until ten; thought we could have breakfast somewhere.”

“Can’t think about food,” Sherlock groaned exaggeratedly. “Ask me in an hour.”

John nodded understanding. He picked up Sherlock’s hand and played idly with his fingers, softly massaging his knuckles, then tracing tickling paths over the sensitive surface of his palm.

“Coach wants me in his office at half-eight,” Sherlock said, and it felt like spitting a stone.

“What for?”

Sherlock gave John a look that scolded him; he knew. They both did.

“He’s a good coach; maybe he’ll have some ideas. Advice.”

“I’m sure he’s got endless advice. What I need is to start. All these disruptions in my schedule are wrecking my flow. Put me at the top of the roster, get out of my head, let me play.”

“Tell him,” John suggested. “Maybe in less demanding terms.”

Sherlock reached between them to fold the laptop and set it aside. He clicked off the lamp and reached for John, nudging and wriggling his way into an embrace, head on John’s chest, curled tight beside him cradling John’s shoulder beneath one hand. He dug in, nosing close.

“Done talking?” John astutely deduced.

“Mm.”

“Really done.”

“Mm.”

“Night then,” John said, and kissed his hair, and shifted just enough to sink Sherlock deeper into him. What had he done with himself before John Watson? Sherlock shuddered to think, and so didn’t. All was as it should be, and there was nothing for it but to be present in that moment.  He stroked one big toe up and down over John’s ankle, just slowly, until he drifted off.

 

“I’m not gonna scratch you, or put you on leave, nothing drastic,” coach Lestrade assured him as they faced each other down across his desk. “I’m not worried. I know exactly who you are and I know I can depend on you. If things are rough, just get back to basics.”

Sherlock wanted to roll his eyes. He wanted to snap back that he hadn’t played at a ‘basics’ level since before he grew hair on his bollocks.

He nodded. “I agree. Sometimes it’s best.”

“We’ve got some easy games in this next couple weeks. Why don’t you take some time, do some conditioning work with Bob Whitehouse—reflexes, twitch, quick-response. There’s a lot you can do off-ice with that. Watch some of your tapes against the west coast teams. Think of it as a working holiday.”

Sherlock wanted to snort. He carried on nodding.

“We’ll pencil in a start for you when we get out west. Six games between now and then. Focus up, no risk of getting hurt, or of damaging your stats. . .just do the work and I know you’ll be ready.”

“Have you got a cigarette?” Sherlock asked.

“The missus made me quit,” Lestrade replied apologetically. “Consider yourself lectured about smoking.”

“Absolutely.” Sherlock did not get up from his chair as he had not been dismissed, but all his energy was urging him Up and Out. “Anything else?”

“Look, Holmes,” the coach began, in a different tone, looking Sherlock in the eyes with a new brand of intensity. “You’re my guy. You’re part of why I took this job. I know you’re solid; I haven’t got a single doubt that this is just a scratch on the record.”

“What’s a record, grand-dad?” Sherlock asked, with a puzzled expression.

“Oi, now,” Lestrade scolded him. “All I’m saying is this is not something to get your tits in a twist about.”

 _Oh, are you into that?_ Sherlock thought automatically, but definitely did not say aloud.

“You’ve been playing a long time, pro a long time; just ease up on yourself—you know—mentally—and concentrate on the physical stuff. Just reminding your body what it needs to do is often all it takes to shake it off and get back to work.”

_Keep talking like that, I’m coming over this desk to grind on you before you even have time to tell me to fuck off._

 “You’re right, of course,” Sherlock said blandly.

“Good, then. I’ll check in with you. Coach Whitehouse will be in touch later today to set up some one-on-one time. Make sure you take advantage of it.”

“I will, indeed.”

Twisting tits, reminding his body what it needs to do, one-on-one time? If Sherlock had been in an even slightly less dour state of mind, he’d have come in his trousers already. He sighed relief as he shook his coach’s offered hand (thick fingers, _christ_ , this meeting was torture on multiple levels, and what had Sherlock done to deserve being cast into such a hell? At least some of whatever it was, he’d gladly do again), and went straight from Lestrade’s office in the Garden to the practice arena across the street. Surely there’d be someone there—some of the women players whose home arena it was, even an equipment guy, anyone who could skate and shoot—who could fire a few at him. He had an excess of weird energy to burn.

 

LoPresti got start after start, and win after win, making huge saves, working overtime to prove himself worthy. No doubt other teams around the league were taking note, looking at their own starting goaltenders’ records and making calculations about who might be offered in trade. All well and good for him; he was a quality goalie, no doubt, with a very different style to Sherlock’s which had always made him seem like less than a threat. Now there was chatter in the sports press about LoPresti’s rise to the occasion of Holmes’s collapse, how adeptly he filled the gap, how the Brawlers’ head office had a real dilemma to face when it came to the cost/benefit analysis of sitting their ten-million-dollar starting goaltender at risk of making the golden goose unhappy.

Sherlock was in fact deeply unhappy, dressed every night but with his mask on a table behind him and his arse on a stool, instead of in goal where he belonged. No need to shower after games; he undressed and disappeared as quick as he could, avoiding conversation in the room other than the expected attaboys for his teammates after a win. Once he’d skated out to give LoPresti the requisite pat on the helmet and a quick word or two of praise—“good game” said as little or as much as Sherlock wished to say without raising suspicion of sour grapes—he didn’t look at him again.

Mornings he woke early for sex with John when at home or, on the road, to work out. Thurston showed up at practice arenas before the team’s morning skate to fire away at Sherlock, never complained that he had to rise too early or that he was too hungover. Sherlock thanked him at the end of every session, and Thurston always gave the same reply, “No problem, what are friends for, asshole?” It occurred to Sherlock that until fairly recently he hadn’t really known.

He slept restlessly; riding post-orgasmic endorphins into sleep every night but waking at odd, pitch-dark hours to flip his pillow, turn over, and try not to think about the past’s if-onlys and the what-ifs of the unknowable future. He tried to find thirty minutes every day to sit, quiet his mind to the point of emptying it, and most days he managed it, but always he itched to be done, to get up and go, keep moving, and his brain revved back into overdrive in a matter of minutes. He knew it couldn’t hurt; he did doubt, this time around, if it was any help.

The truth of the thing was that he wouldn’t know until he got back his start, and faced down the long length of the rink, five invading men blazing toward him at speed, firing bullets, bombs, the occasional slow-arcing mortar. Thurston didn’t pull his shots, and Sherlock got in his usual practice time with the whole team, but none of it was real. He woke up from nightmares of ill-preparedness, in his goal without his pads, without his stick, even without his team. Though he tried to put it away and be present, during time spent with John—now somewhat rare and that much more precious—he was always thinking about what he could have done better, how many games, days, hours until his promised start in Seattle, his re-entry to the atmosphere, a return to his planet.

On nights when they were at home together, John was his true north, the star by which he could navigate, steady and sexy and witty and kind. Being with John was the one and only easy thing in his life, and the ease made Sherlock lazy and slack; while he lay awake for maddening hours in hotel rooms, in their flat he felt nearly narcoleptic with a need to catch up on missed sleep. He dozed on the sofa, in his chair, on the bed when he was meant to be listening to the details of John’s day, watching tapes of his old games, dinner and a movie under the quilts with John’s bare foot resting on Sherlock’s calf. He apologised and John said he understood, didn’t mind, and shrugged it off. Sherlock counted the condoms and packets of slick in the bedside drawer, hated himself for it because of course he could just ask. Anyway, John had once made some comment that indicated he preferred to keep their flat their own. But Sherlock didn’t ask, and he didn’t know why he didn’t ask.

He worried about losing his job. He could be traded, demoted to second string in some far-off city he’d never get used to because Boston was the closest the US had to his beloved, longed-for London—and even it was not all that close. He could get busted down to Bridgeport; the thought of making such a distinctly-backward step made him queasy. He was worried about his stats. His reputation. His shot at more trophies, more championships, time to sort out his post-retirement career, which no longer seemed necessarily years off. It had been a long time since he’d been so preoccupied, so anxious, so sleepless.

So bored.

He needed to play. He needed his start. He needed his routine, from the first words off his lips upon waking— _game day_ —to the captain’s practice or optional skate he wouldn’t attend, to dressing in his suit and leaving for the arena. He needed to arrange his gear in his locker, check the tapes on his pads. A game of two-touch getting loud with laughter outside the dressing room. He needed to stand by the door, then lead his team up the tunnel and onto the rink, smacking the pyramid of pucks onto the ice as he passed, stretching his quads, saving his teammates’ warm-up shots. He needed to rough up his crease, bang his stick, pop his neck, settle in and focus up. Instead he was wearing a ball cap and chirping the other teams’ forwards as they skated by, probably too far away to hear him but he did it anyway. All this he needed with a cold, stiff ache from deep in his bones. There were gaps in him that needed to be filled, and to leave them empty was to invite disaster. Boredom was not allowed, yet every game night was boring.

The easy answer to boredom loomed like a shadow just beyond a door he needed all his strength to hold closed.


	13. Chapter 13

Wednesday night, with the Demons/Gold Rush “game of the week” on the telly, and Sherlock and John ate their supper on the sofa, Sherlock leaning back with his bare feet on the coffee table probably too close to John’s plate. He’d cooked lemon-and-cream spaghetti while John arranged them salad from a plastic bag, and half a store-bought flourless chocolate cake was coming back to room temperature on the kitchen worktop. In the time it took him to boil the pasta, Sherlock had downed more than half the bottle of chardonnay he’d opened for the sauce, and they shared what was left with their meal. Sherlock had his eye on a pinotage he’d been saving for no reason, to accompany dessert.

“McInearney’s on fire so far this season,” John offered, referencing the Gold Rush second-line center, just then skating past his team’s bench to bump gloves in celebration of his goal, the first of the game.

“Just like Mike and Mags said,” Sherlock agreed. “He’s underappreciated.”

“Flying under the radar. The Rush had a piss-poor season last year.”

Sherlock sipped at his wine, then again, and set it aside. “You’re talking to doctors tomorrow?”

“Researchers, yeah. I’m sort of the opening act for their two days of presenting papers to each other, talking about brain and spine injuries.” John shrugged. “Iain will be there; he wants to hear the speech aloud, now we think it’s finally finished.”

“Doesn’t he teach on weekdays?” Sherlock kept his eyes on the television screen.

“The luncheon I’m speaking at falls between his morning and afternoon classes.” John raised his eyebrows, then set them back in place. “I don’t know how much I’m enjoying all the speech-giving, if I’m honest.”

Sherlock was surprised to hear it; John was passionate about the issue of head trauma in hockey, was in a unique position to raise awareness and possibly even spur change, and thus far had seemed to be enjoying his appearances. Sherlock made a questioning noise, prompting him to go on.

John frowned, looking vaguely embarrassed. “There’s a lot of glad-handing, posing for photos, making small talk before and after. I don’t mind the time I’m talking, and I enjoyed writing it more than I imagined I would—I had some idea it would be like writing theme essays in school, but it’s actually kind of, I don’t know, fun.”

“If typing on a computer is going to be your new definition of fun, we need to discuss a few things,” Sherlock joked.

“Well, no, not fun exactly,” John corrected himself. “But I do enjoy the writing bit. That op-ed, too. If I could just write the words, stand up and read the words, and leave without having to talk to anyone, it would be ideal.”

“You’re the face of the foundation,” Sherlock pointed out. “Showing your face is requisite.”

“I know. I just think that once things are up and running. . .there are incredible people at Heads-Up, and now the spotlight’s on it a bit, that helps them with raising funds and that. But at some point, I’d like to not be the guy in the spotlight. It’s not for me.”

Sherlock nodded and reached over to run his hand up and down John’s back. “And do what instead? Have you thought about it?”

John frowned in a different way. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I miss playing. More than miss it. I feel like I lost a limb. I thought I could do this thing, this anti-concussion ambassador thing, but sometimes. . .” He took a deep breath and shook his head. “I don’t know. Nothing. Nevermind.”

“No, go on,” Sherlock said, and found the remote so he could turn down the volume on the game.

“I feel like a fake.” John looked at him. “I’m just a hockey player. I’m not an expert, or an advocate.”

“Firstly, not ‘just’ a hockey player—one of the best defensemen to play the game. And I know, I’ve studied.” Sherlock smirked. “And you are somewhat of an expert, having had your bell rung several times. Advocacy is just a name for what you’re doing: speaking out on behalf of others not in a similar position to do so. Expert and advocate. Tick, and tick.” Sherlock flicked thumb and forefinger through the air, ticking imaginary boxes.

“I’d rather be a hockey player,” John said simply, not much in it, but Sherlock felt it like a punch in the gut. He slid his hand up along John’s spine to cup his hand around the back of his neck. He worked his thumb against the back corner of John’s jaw, and John let him for a moment, but then rose and walked away, and shut himself behind the bathroom door. Sherlock, feeling useless and lost for words even though none had been asked for, gathered the by-then empty dishes and carried them to the sink, an endeavour that required two trips. He was reaching for a knife to slice the cake when John emerged, rubbing his forehead with fingers and thumb.

Sherlock gestured with the tip of the knife toward the cake, questioning, and John shook his head.

“More wine?” Sherlock offered.

“I have to get up at half-six,” John declined. He didn’t have to elaborate that he resented the reason for his early morning. “Actually, I’m going to tap out on this game,” he said apologetically. “Dinner was fantastic; thank you for that.”

“Of course,” Sherlock said, meaning it two ways. He transferred the cake back to its box, to return it to the fridge. “Going right to sleep, then,” he ventured, an almost-question.

“Well,” John shrugged, his mouth quirking up at the corners. “Not right to sleep.” He gave a pointed look at Sherlock’s lower midsection. “Thought I might tire my jaw first.”

“You do always sleep better after you’ve sucked my cock,” Sherlock replied casually.

“So come on and let me.”

Sherlock played at having to weigh up his decision, casting a faux-dismayed glance at the sink full of dirty dishes. “But there’s this mess,” he protested, already taking a step toward the bedroom despite it.

“Don’t worry; we can make another.”

 

“Hey, thanks for a great time.”

Sherlock gave a lazy half-smile, reached to straighten the collar on the man’s shirt, folding it into place and smoothing it with between fingertips and thumbs. Yves Saint Laurent, off the rack but it fit him properly even without tailoring.

“Next time you’re in town,” the man began, and drew up Sherlock’s left hand to kiss the back of his knuckles, rather sweetly, given the filthy riot of _give-it-to-me-goddammit_ wrestle-fucking that had just transpired between them.

Sherlock only said, “I’ll be in touch,” though of course it was a lie. He’d already forgotten the man’s real name, had mentally added SlimNotShady to his list of CRUZR never-agains. Slightly unfortunate; it had been rather good and Sherlock could imagine a time when the particular variety of sex they’d had might suit his mood. But the rules ruled; if anyone knew that, it was him.

Sherlock walked him out of the hotel suite, allowed himself to be fondled (shoulder, elbow, his hands for rather longer than seemed appropriate) and even to be kissed on the cheek, then shut the door and paused in the kitchenette, seeking hydration. The light from the sitting room barely spilled over the bar differentiating the two spaces, so it was the bulb inside the mini-fridge that put a spotlight on the spilled-out contents of George’s emptied pockets, in a heap on the countertop. Sherlock spun the cap off a bottle of cold lemon-lime soda and gulped down a few swallows, half-emptying the bottle, then belched.

Hotel key card; billfold; cellphone in a case with slots for cards on the back, platinum credit card and driver’s license visible. Folded bills—probably not more than thirty dollars—and some loose change. Two bars of Xanax. A squat plastic vial with a disposable rubbery cap, a residue of light-coloured powder left in it. Sherlock stepped back until he hit the opposite counter, less than a full stride, and kept his eyes on the pile of detritus lest it make any sudden moves. He went on staring at it for as long as it took him to finish his drink. Using thumb and forefinger only, he turned George’s phone face up. He found the information he needed—it was 2:43 a.m.—and also caught sight of a notification of a _Msg from Brooklynne_ : _Love you, honey! xxx_. Sherlock left the phone as was, swept the pills and the plastic vial with the side of one hand into the cupped palm of the other and strode across the suite.

He tried the knob of George’s bedroom and found it unlocked.

“Wake up,” Sherlock said loudly, and found the light switch on the wall, then marched to the side of George’s bed. There was a woman beside him; she looked mildly worried, but quickly vanished beneath the edge of the duvet.

“The fuck, Holmes?” George squinted and half-sat.

“Keep your shit out of my sight or it’s going down the toilet.”

Sherlock punched the pillow beside George’s head, opening his fist to leave behind the drugs; George scrambled to catch it all before it fell and became lost between the bed and the wall.

“Sorry, man.”

Sherlock said nothing, only stood watching George fumble around in his bed.

“What are you, like, one of those—”

“Keep it to yourself,” Sherlock repeated.

“Yeah, fine. Whatever.” He had gathered up the items and moved to put them on the bedside table but seemed to think better of it. “Is that it?” he demanded.

“That’s it,” Sherlock confirmed. He pivoted and stalked to the door.

“Shut off the lights at least!” George called after him, as Sherlock slammed the door behind him. He went straight to his own room, through to the bath, and ran the hot tap to wash his hands. His urge to lick and sniff was rampant and disgusting. Dropping the torn-apart paper wrapper from the small bar of soap into the sink, he scrubbed and scrubbed, even digging in the tips of his fingernails and scraping them full. By the time he was done, his hands were bright red and stinging.

There was an open bottle on his bedside table—his contract rider required red wine—that he and his guest had swigged from when their mouths became dry from panting, still mostly full. Sherlock grabbed it around the neck and thrust it to his mouth, taking deep draughts, swallowing noisily. He licked his lips and got into bed, balanced the bottle between his thighs and reached for the open pack of cigarettes on the nightstand. Once he’d lit one and taken a long drag, he maneuvered the green glass ashtray closer to the edge of the table where he could reach it better. He sighed out the smoke, feeling rattled.

It was not as if he hadn’t been around pills and cocaine in the time since he’d got clean; he was a professional hockey player, after all, and the reason there’d never been a league-wide doping scandal was not because players didn’t use drugs. Most players’ duffels held at least one prescription bottle, and the team doctor had everything they could want, gave everything they asked for. But before rooming with John, he’d mostly been paired with the veteran players—Bouchard, Kocur, and early on, Gerhardt for a season—and they were family men with more to lose, tended toward avoiding pain relief stronger than what one could buy in a pharmacy without presenting ID. None smoked, none drank to excess. Even Thurston, who was a bit of a stereotype in every other fashion, had not been a partier, other than when it came to chatting up women. To have to spend every night on the road sharing close quarters with sleeping pills, cocaine, and who knew what else, did not feel entirely a tolerable proposition.

He called John.

“Hey,” came his sleep-thick voice. “Morning. All right?”

“Sorry to wake you.”

“No, it’s fine. Alarm’s going soon, anyway. You’re up late. Can’t sleep?”

John’s casual concern for Sherlock’s well-being was like an enveloping blanket. “I don’t know; I haven’t tried.”

“I can hear you smoking,” John said, more teasing than scolding.

“I’m putting it out right now,” Sherlock assured him, taking one last drag and then dutifully crushing out the barely-begun cigarette.

“M-hm,” John mused, with some good-natured sarcasm in it.

“What’s your day like?” Sherlock asked.

“You didn’t call me at three in the morning to ask about my day.”

“No,” Sherlock admitted. There was a beat of silence, in which he weighed his options. He took another swig of the wine to excuse his silence.

“What are you drinking?”

“Off-brand soda. There’s one in the fridge called Professor Peepers. What do you suppose that even means?”

“That’s a puzzler,” John agreed. “Wish you were here to deal with this hard-on.”

Sherlock, formerly sated and then quickly riled up and adrenalized with anger, was backward-crashing toward exhaustion. His reply was sincere, if bland. “Wish I was there, too. Or you here.” At least if John was the occupant of the suite’s other bedroom, Sherlock would not have had to scrub his hands raw to remove every trace molecule of anti-anxiety medication and coke dust, lest he accidentally remind his brain how lovely drugs were by absently putting a finger in his mouth. Among his many other fine qualities, John Watson was a good buffer. He’d even discarded his own pain medication rather than put Sherlock at risk of relapse.

“Heard from Coach about your start?” John asked.  In sixteen hours, the Brawlers were opening a five-game west coast road trip with a game against the Condors.

“Not officially,” Sherlock admitted, and it struck him that he had been so distracted by rough sex and illicit contraband that he hadn’t worried about whether he would start the game for nearly six consecutive hours. “But that’s what we talked about; it’s what I was promised and what I’ve planned for.”

“You’ll start. Lestrade’s word is good; he’s not going to jerk you around just to shut you up. That’s not his style.”

“I agree,” Sherlock said. “But I’m waiting for the word, regardless.”

“Text him,” John suggested.

“He won’t put anything in writing before he submits the game roster.”

“Special case.”

Sherlock let go a mild laugh. “Not to him. His job depends on us winning, not on appeasing me.” He swallowed down the last of the wine and set the bottle on the table with a dull thud. “Naturally, I’d prefer everyone’s job depend on appeasing me; that would be ideal.”

John laughed.

“You’re good. You’ve been putting in the work; he’ll have seen that.”

Sherlock hummed, if not agreement, at least acquiescence. “I’ll let you go,” he said, with some reluctance.

“It’s all right,” John reassured.

“No, I should get some sleep. Game day.”

“Game day,” John agreed. “Sleep well, then. Talk later.”

Sherlock’s walk to the bathroom let him know he’d drunk his full, and then some. His ears were hot, but he felt easy and couldn’t bring himself to worry much about hearing from coach Lestrade. Back in bed, he wrapped the duvet around his head, dug down deep into the bedding, and counted backwards by sevens, not for long, until he drifted off.


	14. Chapter 14

_“Back in the net tonight for the Brawlers is Sherlock Holmes, who we’ve seen more often in the back-up seat beside the bench the last several games, as Anthony LoPresti put in a respectable performance, winning five of his last six starts. Holmes is twenty-six, nineteen, and eight in career starts against this Los Angeles team. The puck drops, the game is on.”_

_“Excellent save by Sherlock Holmes, Jack. Quick left to right motion, stacks the pads, and look how big he gets even in that more horizontal position, with the catching glove in the air to minimise the shooter’s chance.”_

_“Just over four minutes left in the second, Brawlers lead two to one, and we’ll be back after this break.”_

_“MacGraw tangled up in the corner with DeLuca, Holt-Kitteredge tries to poke it out from under them, does it, passes quickly up the ice, here comes Kendall fresh out of the box, takes the puck on the breakaway! It’s one on none as the Brawlers’ defensemen scramble to catch up. Kendall fakes the wrister, backhand, SAVE BY HOLMES! Sherlock Holmes will cover the puck and get his Brawlers team a couple seconds to catch their breath. What do you think, Brick? Are we seeing the return of the reliable, big-save-making Sherlock Holmes?”_

_“It sure looks that way, Jack. Whatever issues he had early in the season, it seems the work he’s done recently to get back to playing his game has worked well for him. A couple of monster saves tonight, including Kendall’s shot there on the breakaway, and overall he’s looked more like what we expect from Holmes—focused, relaxed, making quick moves and guarding the net. Holmes looks good tonight, Jack.”_

_“Brawlers still leading two goals to one, with eleven minutes left here in the third; we get a faceoff in Boston’s defensive end.”_

_“Mellon in the box on a questionable tripping call, a minute and change left to play, so the Los Angeles Condors will finish the game on a power play, hoping to tie this one up and force overtime. Bouchard and DeLuca on the faceoff, Condors get control, and there goes L.A. goalie Jared Teague headed for the bench so the Condors get the extra skater. It’s six on four, Holt-Kitteredge handles the puck through the neutral zone. Passes around the boards to Jenssen, the one-timer, deflected, DeLuca gets the rebound, a bomb up high, save by Holmes! Puck loose in front, Kocur takes the shot from 200 feet—why not—and scores! On an empty net from just about as far away as he could fire it, Pietr Kocur puts this one to bed. Brawlers, three, Condors, one, and another in the win column for goaltender Sherlock Holmes. Looks like he’s back, folks. And we’ll be back Thursday for our next stop on this west coast swing, up in Sacramento. Join us!”_

 

“God, you were brilliant tonight,” John told him. Sherlock was as comforted by the sight of the bedroom wallpaper in the background as he was by seeing John’s face smiling back at him from his phone’s screen. “How did it feel?”

“Not particularly good nor particularly bad,” Sherlock replied.

“Just another day at the office,” John suggested.

“Precisely.”

“That’s good, then, yeah?”

“I wouldn’t have wished it another way.” Sherlock was naked in the hotel bed, in the dark except that the window curtains were still open for ambient city light.

“You’re a worker, _moitié_ ,” John said, with some measure of pride in his voice. “Can’t wait to see you Tuesday. I’m trying to get on an earlier flight.”

Sherlock was pleased. “Shall I invite your man in Seattle to the game? Old time’s sake?”

John guffawed. “Not necessary, by any stretch. Though. . .now you mention it, I wonder what he makes of the Controversial Coming Out Story of Pro Athlete John Watson. He always struck me as pretty skeptical about me keeping my private life to myself.”

“Fuck him,” Sherlock said casually.

“Is that a directive, or. . . ?”

“And you, too,” Sherlock fired back, full of mock offense.

“Yes, please. Christ, why are you so far away? I could use a good seeing-to.”

“There’s always CRUZR,” Sherlock suggested.

“There’s no one on there compares to you.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sherlock argued. “Have you checked?”

“I don’t need to.”

Sherlock, unaccountably, felt his neck and cheeks warming.

“Anyway, it’s late and I’m tired,” John said with finality, ending the discussion of whether he could arrange a hookup to sub in for the absent Sherlock.

“Shall I let you go?”

“In a minute. What about you? Going out tonight?”

“I thought about it, but once the adrenaline drained off I felt sluggish and lumpen and so retreated here to bed.”

There was a half-second pause before John made a show of licking his palm and thrusting it down out of sight. “Race you,” he said, and his mouth tightened into an unvoiced _ooh_ as he took himself in hand.

Sherlock had a packet of slick beside him on the mattress already, and so tore its corner with his teeth as he kicked down the covers.

“Show me,” he muttered, and John obliged, adjusting his phone to give Sherlock a view of most of his torso, and of his hand working quick and tight around his big cock. Sherlock cursed and rolled his slippery palm over his crown before stroking downward.

John tilted the phone once more, and breathed, “Now you.” Sherlock searched for a good angle, giving John a fairly close view of his curled fingers and thumb pumping up and down in a loose fist.

“Too dark?” Sherlock managed. “Can you see?”

“Fuck, yeah; you’re gorgeous. Play with your foreskin.”

“You’re just trying to slow me down,” Sherlock protested.

“I want to see,” John insisted.

“Uh—another, ah, time. . .”

They both devolved into moaning, half-views and bad angles of each others’ faces enough to urge them on. Watching John bite his lips, hearing him hum and groan, was nearly as arousing to Sherlock as seeing him stroke himself, his intense expressions and rising vocal tones a soundtrack Sherlock could easily produce a mental-movie to match. John opened his eyes, and they shared a desperate smile for an instant before Sherlock let his own eyes fall shut, just listening to John’s _oh yeah, ah yeah, yeah. . .that’s it yeah._

Sherlock’s orgasm was protracted and thrumming, low-frequency waves of throbbing pleasure ebbing outward from his center, then softly rippling back in. He listened as John closely followed, sounding frustrated and elated at once, then murmuring his name in that happy-sleepy way he sometimes did, sounding as if he couldn’t believe his luck. Sherlock’s cheeks warmed once more to hear it.

“That’ll do,” John said at last, and the two looked at each other with the half-lidded, grinning giddy expressions of recently-spent lovers. “All right?”

“More than all right,” Sherlock assured him, and rolled onto his side as he gathered up the covers and bundled himself, digging his head gratefully into the pillow. “You should sleep; what’s your morning like?”

John rubbed his forehead and frowned slightly. “Meetings,” he replied, “Meetings, meetings. If I fall asleep right this second I can get three and a quarter hours.”

“Then I’ll let you go.”

“Worth it,” John told him. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Sleep well, _ma moitié_.”

For the first time in several weeks, Sherlock did sleep well.

 

He had done all the right things. Shoot-around with Thurston and Kocur in the morning, then a head-clearing three-mile run. Lunch time phone call to John, who was on his way back to the flat after a day in the Heads Up Foundation’s office. Checked his equipment; found an empty stairway where he sat and cleared his mind, acknowledged his emotions, bodily sensations, and monkey-mind thoughts, then let them all go. Joined in with his teammates for a round of two-touch outside the room. Roughed his crease, banged his stick, tossed his head. The game started, and Sherlock was fully present, focused like a laser beam, fully armed to defend his house.

Three minutes in, the Gold Rush scored on him—one-timer from the hash marks, through a screen. Arguably not a gettable puck. Sherlock turned away from where he knew the TV cameras were trained on him, fired a stream of water from his bottle into his mouth, then spit it, as always. As he settled back into his crease, though, something cracked—or slid out of place—and from that moment on, he was scrambling. A distinct, unnerving sense settled in his limbs and gut that the game was rushing ahead of him, and no matter what he did or thought, no matter how many of his breaths he tuned into, no matter how much resetting he did when play moved away from him, Sherlock could not catch up. He was simply out of sync.

The Brawlers’ offense were bigger and faster than the Sacramento forwards, and kept play in the attacking zone more often than not, giving Sherlock room to breathe. Boston scored one late in the first to tie it, then kept control mostly in the Gold Rush end until the period ended.

In the room, coach Lestrade talked at them, neither pleased nor riled. Sherlock didn’t hear a word of it, and once the coach turned them loose, he dug out his phone from his duffel and texted John.

_They’re going to beat me._

_TXT from JW: Nope, you look good._

_Do I?_

_TXT from JW: Not covering up too much, not taking faceoffs, good passing. You look really good_.

Sherlock wanted to trust it—John watching on television from the opposite coast—but John was hardly objective. Sherlock thought his hands might be shaking so he put his phone away without finishing their exchange, and yanked up the front of his sweater to pointlessly unfasten and refasten the plastic buckles of his chest protector.

The second period brought more of the same. The Gold Rush offense checked in and increased the pressure in Sherlock’s end, forcing him back to work despite his continuing off-kilter sensation. He made a handful of saves before they put another one past him, a stick-side wraparound when he was only halfway back from the glove side, where he’d made two saves in rapid succession, head and arms outside his crease. A good goal he couldn’t have saved. Nonetheless he cursed himself as he spat his water.

Less than ninety seconds later, Sacramento scored again. Sherlock saw the bullet flying, slid aside to square up to it, raised the catching glove, and it went in beside his chest, just below his elbow. He felt the puck brush the sleeve of his sweater.

He should have saved it. He saw it coming. He was ready for it. And yet, the music was playing and the Gold Rush players were clumped up in a huddle off to his right, congratulating their goal-scorer. He could imagine what the play-by-play and color guys were saying on the BSN broadcast right now, wondering how Holmes could have missed that save, no one in front of him, a long lob from high up the ice with plenty of time for him to get himself in catching position, or even to stop it with his chest. Maybe he’d flinched.

Had he _flinched_?

Boston kept control most of the remaining four minutes of the second, had some good chances the Gold Rush goaltender robbed them of.  Just before the horn, Sherlock dropped a puck and covered it, though it should have been one he brushed aside; Kocur was nearby and with his long reach could have scooped up a well-placed rebound. The faceoff in his own end meant more pressure from the Rush, and they took three more shots before the siren went. Sherlock was at the bench in seconds, stomped down the tunnel without raising his mask.

Their coach was more intense during his second intermission remarks, pointing out at least one fuck-up by every player.  Sherlock had tipped his mask onto the top of his head out of respect for Lestrade but he kept his eyes cast down in front of him, picking out discoloured spots on the floor to focus on instead of listening to the list of his team’s faults. Whatever they were doing mattered little if Sherlock couldn’t hold back the Rush from scoring on them.

“Holmes, they’re getting lucky on you; their passing plays look pretty sloppy. Keep your head in it, eyes open. Their offense is no match for our D; do your job and we’ll get out of this alive.”

Sherlock nodded and said, “Yeah, Coach,” then immediately tuned him out again. Once Lestrade left them, Sullivan launched into one of his psych-up talks.

“We got this, boys. Go hard up-ice. Get in their heads when we can, tell’em who they are.”

Thurston piped up, “Buncha cake-baking party clowns; their wives have a support group to cry about their tiny, shriveled dicks.”

“No doubt,” Sully affirmed. “Put in two, smash the OT, we’re back here listening to tunes and eating pizza. No worries; we got this.”

Mutterings of agreement could be heard all over the room. Sherlock had clenched his fists the second he sat; easing his fingers open revealed red half-moon slits dug into his pale palms. John had told him he looked good. Coach Lestrade had said the Gold Rush were just lucky. Twenty minutes and it would be done. His teammates would work on scoring; with any luck he’d have an easy third.

True to their word, the Brawlers’ closed the lead by scoring one early, and the offense was playing quick and careful, minimising turnovers and taking shots wherever they could rather than waiting for the fancy play to develop. The Gold Rush started icing the puck at every opportunity, repeatedly stopping play, probably to throw the Brawlers off their rhythm. Sherlock’s hand went up again and again as the puck sailed past his line.

About fifteen minutes in, the Rush got something going and Sherlock faced a barrage of shots from every angle, almost every opposing player. The Brawlers’ defensemen gave him good cover, and Hatch even skated behind him through the crease to make a save, knocking away a slow-sliding puck Sherlock had momentarily lost track of. Hatch was all smiles as he skated around before the next face-off, joking about his goalie stats. Sherlock kept his head turned toward the back of the goal, fidgeting with his water bottle and catching glove.

In the last minute of play, Boston put in the tying goal, and overtime seemed inevitable. Sherlock’s shoulders ached. Faceoff at center, Bouchard couldn’t get control of it and all at once Sherlock faced an onslaught; all he saw were gold sweaters charging at him, had no sense that his teammates were even on the ice, let alone in the mix. A rocket of a shot from up high, and Sherlock saw it a mile away, an easy save. They’d go into OT, where his guys dominated; the Rush hadn’t won in overtime since the previous October, over a year earlier. Three-on-three sudden death was just not something they had figured out. Sherlock twitched into position, ready to flick the puck aside and behind him, so his D could pick it up and run out the clock.

The puck hit his blocker exactly where he expected, and he flung it aside, but where he expected Kocur to be, there was a Sacramento forward who skated the puck quickly around the net and tried for the wraparound. Sherlock made a pad save, but his knee torqued so he couldn’t get centered, and the Rush put one in over his shoulder, right in the center of the goal up high; Sherlock heard it ring the cross bar.

Ten minutes later, in the shower, he vomited at his feet.

“Aw, fuck, Holmesy, you got the flu?” Mellon asked.

“Maybe,” Sherlock replied, though he knew he had nothing of the sort. “Yeah, maybe.” His hands were tingling; his face was tingling; his head seemed to float a foot above his shoulders. His heart was pounding so loud Sherlock was sure he could hear it through the wall of his chest.

“Well, stay the fuck away from me, then,” Mellon joked, “Maybe get something from the doc.”

Sherlock, who had not taken so much as an aspirin in five years, thought a handful of anything chased with a bottle of cabernet was just the solution he needed. Immediately following that thought was a fresh wave of panic, and he braced himself with one hand on the wet tile wall, hung his head and tried to breathe through his nose, waiting for the vomit to rise again.

“Fuck,” he cursed, under his breath but aloud. He finished his shower and returned to the dressing room, where he bundled into workout gear rather than his usual suit, pulling his sweatshirt’s hood around his ears to indicate he wanted to be left alone. On the shelf in his locker was the thing every Brawler dreaded: a postcard with the logo on one side and a hand-scrawled note on the other.

_I’ll buy you breakfast tomorrow. Hotel restaurant, 9:00. –Coach_


	15. Chapter 15

“Sometimes guys get shaky. You know this. It’s not a crisis.” Lestrade had been scolding him for the better part of an hour, picking apart his performance not just in the previous night’s game but over the course of the season to that point. Sherlock agreed with most of what he said. Sherlock missed easy saves. Sherlock was in his own head. Sherlock was probably having some post-championship letdown. Things all right outside the arena? All good at home, and that?

“Yes, fine. Very good.”

After what seemed like endless insults against which Sherlock was not permitted to defend himself, only nod and hum, parrot back what was said using fresh phrases, to let Coach know he was listening and understood, at last their plates were empty and Lestrade waved off the waitress’s offer of more coffee, requesting the bill.

“Holmes, listen. I know you’re better than you’ve been looking. I’m a hundred percent behind you, and whatever you need, just say it and we’ll arrange it. You’re the best in the league, by a mile. Never forget it.” Lestrade looked painfully sincere and Sherlock felt sick. Compassion and support was not going to fix whatever was going on with him. He needed to get his head out of his arse, power through, play like Sherlock Holmes. He found he’d been more comfortable when his coach had been berating him and putting his faults under a microscope. Kindness had always made him uncomfortable.

“I’m working on it,” Sherlock said seriously. Despite Lestrade’s efforts to end the discussion on a bolstering high note, Sherlock felt doomed.

“I get it. I’ve seen you. I’m not worried. Let’s just try to shrug off the past and move forward, all right?”

Sherlock braced himself for the inevitable, painful plot twist: Lestrade telling him to take a seat for the rest of the road trip, keep up the off-hours work, and we’ll start over back home in Boston next week.

“So do what you need to do,” Lestrade finished, as he signed his name and wrote his room number. “and we’ll see how you look tomorrow night.”

Sherlock hid his shock in his napkin, rubbing it roughly against his lips before balling it up and dropping it on his plate. He had been anticipating rough treatment, the scalding humiliation of a demotion—however temporary—to be served in a perspiration-free sweater at the far end of the Brawlers’ bench. And here came his coach wearing kid gloves, stroking him, coddling, trying to brace him up despite the obviousness of his ongoing, irreversible collapse. He’d have rather the former. It was more embarrassing to be placated and patronised than it would have been to be picked apart and shamed. His performance did not rate encouragement; Sherlock deserved—and would have welcomed—a beating.

He forced a smile, nodding affirmation that all was well, or soon would be, as he shook Lestrade’s hand and they parted ways. Sherlock, desperate for distraction and even a small dose of pain, headed for the gym.

 

It wasn’t hard to find a man free for an afternoon assignation, given the financial and business district lay adjacent to the arena. Sherlock scrutinised the photos to assure himself, as much as was possible, that they were legitimate. The address he was given was of an office tower, nothing to distinguish it, glass and brass and pink marble floors. Pressboard instead of real wood in the lobby, though, a remodel in the 2010s done on the cheap that probably made the developer a very rich man. Upon signing in to the visitors’ log, noting the name of the thirty-fourth floor business he’d been told to report to, Sherlock put together that the real estate tycoon with poor taste in finishings was none other than the man he’d enticed into a hookup.

The elevator opened into a hushed, lush-carpeted office lobby. The man whose slightly graying hair and Patek Philippe wristwatch matched those in the CRUZR photos that had caught Sherlock’s eye just happened on purpose to be lingering near the receptionist’s desk, greeted him deferentially, as if NHL goaltender Sherlock Holmes was being wooed into a real estate investment, instead of an anonymous rendezvous. The receptionist remained blandly blank-faced, her perfunctory smile making it obvious she had no idea who Sherlock was, which was just fine by him, and his date no doubt agreed.

He was called Steven, a name Sherlock was fond of because it had been the name of his first lover, a coffee shop counterman with sharp, gravity-defying fringe and a strong jaw. The newer, older Steven walked Sherlock down a corridor past closed office doors and glass-walled conference rooms on one side, half-walled cubicles on the other. Steven greeted the few people they passed, the not-too-friendly boss. Sherlock shifted his eyes down and to the side, eyed him up from Prada oxfords to Hugo Boss suit to silk necktie and sapphire-studded tie tack.  Matching sapphire links in the French cuffs of his shirt. It occurred to Sherlock that for the first time in many years, he was about to have sex with a man even wealthier than he was.

Steven’s office did not disappoint: burled wood desk and button-tufted leather chairs; bookshelves of leather-bound volumes, not only for show—architecture and atlases, reflective of his vocation, but also sailing and ornithology, which must be his personal passions—one glass wall with a stunning city view; a few select awards and commendations, including a college diploma not from an Ivy or even one of the better respected business schools, but from the College of Washington State. Steven was a scrapper, up from nothing, American dream. He shut the door behind them.

“Where can I have you?”

Sherlock felt a bit weak-kneed; it was a delightful shock not to be offered a drink, small talk, fake friendship. He glanced around. “Where do you usually have them?”

Steven closed in on him, and just the way he stepped so boldly into Sherlock’s space was disarming, made it clear he was not the sort of successful, powerful man who wished to slide into submission behind every closed door. He was master of his domain, no doubt, and Sherlock felt himself being claimed. Steven reached between them and unfastened the button on Sherlock’s suit jacket. His eyes were green, and stared. Sherlock’s mouth crooked up at one corner and he let himself be manhandled, his jacket slid from his shoulders and tossed onto a nearby chair, his sides and chest and the back of his shoulders evaluated by sliding palms and dragging fingers. Steven leaned in as if to kiss him and Sherlock lifted his chin to offer his throat instead; amenable to the redirection, Steven licked a narrow stripe up the side of his throat, tongued the lobe of his ear.

“Up against the bookcase—see that mirror? So I can watch your face.”

Sherlock found the landmarks, nodded, worked at Steven’s belt. The hands roaming his torso moved on to resculpt the curve of his arse, brushed hard against the button placket of his trousers, and drifted sideways and down, feeling for the shape of his prick. Sherlock’s breath caught, and the tycoon hummed satisfaction.

Soon enough Sherlock was in his place, bracing himself against a thick wooden shelf with one hand, with Steven at his back, both of them still dressed with only their trousers open and Sherlock’s pulled down around his thighs. Mouth open at the back of Sherlock’s neck, forcing a roll of his head to make space, Steven pulled at his shirt collar with his teeth, groped with probing fingers into the cleft of his arse. Pinched a wide expanse of the flesh there. There was a mirror on a stand, decorative knick knack with an ornate pewter frame, on the shelf at Sherlock’s eye level. Clever how the horniest ones always found ways to make every single object in their environment all about sex. Steven had already revealed the drawer in a pretty little octagonal cabinet, full of condom packets and tubes of lubricant; no doubt he knew all the connection points to tie ropes to his chairs and desk legs, had an extra bathrobe in the en suite bath, and a secret stash of hundreds and fifties to derail blackmail schemes or pay escorts.

There was a pot of slippery stuff open on a lower shelf, and Steven dipped in two fingers, scooped up a generous glob. As he rubbed it possessively deep into Sherlock’s arse, he rumbled, “Can I go inside?”

“No,” Sherlock said with certainty. “But don’t be kind.”

Steven guided Sherlock’s free hand up to the bookshelf— _brace yourself, then_ —and tilted his hips back where he wanted them. He was close at Sherlock’s back as he thrust his cock into the space he’d slicked, pinching Sherlock’s hip, shoving at the meat of his buttocks with rough fingers, his chest thudding up against Sherlock’s back when he moved to slide between Sherlock’s thighs. He went hard, groping and gripping to pull Sherlock to him, against him, and now and then they caught each other’s gaze in the portrait mirror, and Sherlock shivered—taken—giving in.

Steven reached around and cupped Sherlock’s bollocks in one hand, squeezing and rolling, possessive, uncareful. Reflexively jumping away from the stimulation, Sherlock thrust his arse against Steven’s prick and hips, and made him grunt, then growl, and hold him there and fuck harder against him, his cockhead slipping fast and rough over Sherlock’s hole. Taking him in hand, Steven’s fingers were more sticky than slick, but his grip was perfect and he pulled hard and fast. Noisy over Sherlock’s shoulder, he growled, and panted, cursed, grunted in time. Sherlock’s mouth was dry and he licked his lips, shifted his weight to free his hand, wrapped it around Steven’s to guide him.

They found a rhythm that pleased them both, punishing, hard and slightly awkward, uncomfortable and thrilling, and Sherlock felt the pressure building.

“I’ll come,” he warned, trying to slow the pace of Steven’s jerking, afraid of spending his cum all over the leatherbound books and polished wood shelves.

Steven kept pounding hard between his thighs, his hips smacking loudly against Sherlock’s arse. In time with it, he grunted out, “Yeah. You. Will.” He changed the angle, thrusting upward, holding Sherlock’s hip in place, challenging Sherlock’s balance. “Come. Come. Come on, _come_.”

Half off his feet, his shirttails irritatingly tickling his thighs, both their belt buckles rattling, Sherlock dipped his fingertips between Steven’s, to tickle and pinch the crown of his own cock while they pulled together and Steven bucked up faster and harder behind him. Sherlock’s orgasm was a sudden shock to his system, as quick and forceful as the whole encounter had been, and Steven maneuvered his hand to catch what he could, then jammed his fingers into his mouth, licking and sucking, and Sherlock watched his reflection in the mirror—sweat at his temples, shirt collar unbuttoned, necktie loosened, sucking Sherlock’s cum off his fingers and coming, his eyes rolling back before he closed them. His spunk was hot and fluid-thin, flooding the space between Sherlock’s arse-cheeks, and sliding down toward the inside of his thigh. Steven’s fingers at his hip would surely leave bruises.

He bit a possessive kiss onto the back of Sherlock’s neck, just above his shirt collar, and finally let him go; as he stepped away from Sherlock’s back, Sherlock had a strange collapsing sensation, despite his hand firmly on the shelf’s edge, he felt as if something that had been supporting him had been suddenly yanked away, and he had to catch himself falling. He wondered if he could trust his legs to keep him upright; he felt weak all over.

Steven politely directed him to the en suite bath—hidden door, small but with a shower and even a bidet—and Sherlock cleaned himself up, checking his thighs and arse for marks, and feeling oddly disappointed to find none that were likely to last very long.

“Feel free to message me, anytime,” Steven told him, with a sly smile, and in acknowledgement of knowing exactly who Sherlock was and what he did, casually added, “Next time you’re in town.” He had buttoned his shirt collar and tightened the knot on his necktie, wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief he was just then folding and returning to the hip pocket of his trousers. He was handsome, late forties, and now that Sherlock got a good look at him without the fog of lust clouding his vision, he noticed a pale, sunken impression on his left ring finger. Photos of the wife and kiddies in small frames on his desk.

Sherlock adjusted his shirt cuffs beneath the edges of his jacket. He gave a skeptical, not-quite-apologetic hum, but what came out of his mouth surprised him.

“I’m still in town tomorrow.”

Steven reached into a metal stand on the edge of his desk and peeled off one of his business cards. He wrote a number across the back of it, using a very expensive pen that slept in its own, velvet-lined bed beside the desk calendar. He passed the card to Sherlock, who pocketed it without looking at it.

“My private cell number,” Steven told him. “I have some things I can rearrange tomorrow afternoon, if you’ve the time.”

Sherlock remained noncommittal, unsure of his own intention. Steven walked him out to the lobby, shook his hand as they said their goodbyes.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New hockey term! Well, a sports term, generally.
> 
> "The Yips" is a term used to describe a player's fine-motor skills inexplicably collapsing for reasons not related to injury (in other words, it's more likely a psychological condition). Some players are able to overcome a case of the yips and return to their previous level of play; others never do, and their careers are ended by it.

Alex George had invited Sherlock for dinner with him and a few of the younger players, only barely disguising his hope Sherlock would refuse. The veteran players thought Sherlock weird, but were accustomed to it; the newer guys found it easier to avoid him rather than try to engage with him off-ice. All of it was fine with Sherlock; he had been without friends for the best part of his thirty-one years and didn’t see a need to acquire them. True though that was, he found himself at loose ends in a hotel suite on a free evening, without John. Flipping through television channels, lying on his bed with the empty room service tray beside him, Sherlock found himself wishing for John’s company—intimate, of course, but to his own slight shock, otherwise as well.

He sat upright enough to refill his wine glass, cycled through television channels until he landed on a largely terrible film about a successful but unmarried woman having a baby with her gay best friend. Sherlock felt nothing but disdain for the man; why weigh oneself down when one’s life could be nothing but fun, much like Sherlock’s own. It was a tolerable distraction—mostly he was interested in the wine, which was local and not terribly bad given the short season—though eventually Sherlock’s mind did begin to wander, and where it wandered was out the door of his bedroom, through the sitting room to the closed bedroom door of third-line right wing Alex George, the adulterous, overgrown boy Sherlock had the bad fortune to be paired with for road trips.

To shove aside musings about whether the door was unlocked, whether George’s shave bag was in plain sight, whether it was unzipped, and what was likely inside it, Sherlock instead considered his likelihood to suck Alex George’s cock (were he not straight, were he not a teammate, were he not a drug abuser). Knowing himself as he did, he easily admitted that of course he probably would, given the chance. George was decent looking—dark blonde, with a lantern jaw and wide pale eyes—obviously fit and muscular (ho-hum, weren’t they all, wasn’t Sherlock himself), and there was a certain appeal to the fantasy cliché of turning a straight man—even if only for six or seven minutes. Sherlock could doubtless persuade George to let him. He was very persuasive.

_TXT from JW: Hey you._

John had such impeccable timing, even on the other side of the country.

_I was just thinking about you._

_TXT from JW: Were you really?_

_Not exactly. But I was thinking about sex._

_TXT from JW: That, I very easily believe. Not long now. I got on the earlier flight so I’ll be in Vancouver late morning._

_Excellent._

_TXT from JW: Keeping busy? Went to the zoo or the batting cages with the boys today, or whatever outing they put together for you, I’m sure._

Sherlock frowned distaste even though there was no one nearby to see it.

 _I found another diversion_ , he texted back, then changed the subject. _Just had an in-room meal and I’m watching an awful 1990s film._

_TXT from JW: Ah, a perfect evening, then. I thought about going for a run when I got home from the office._

_Only thought about it?_

_TXT from JW: Afraid so. Did you invite George to share your dinner and a movie?_

_God, no. I declined an invitation to a team dinner at a steakhouse._

_TXT from JW: It wouldn’t hurt you to be friendly with him. All those roomies before me, were you always so distant?_

_Why would I not be? Anyway, George does not have a single thing to offer in way of companionship._

_TXT from JW: If I were the jealous sort, I suppose I’d be relieved to hear that???_

Sherlock considered telling John what he’d discovered of George’s extracurricular activities, about pills and vials of powder, and the fact Sherlock’s brain kept circling back to the topic, and that it was wearying in its perseverance. To constantly ignore the possibility of unattended drugs two rooms away was energy-draining. Sherlock had briefly toyed with the idea of requesting a room change, but knew it would be refused—if one wanted it, they’d all want it; the entire season’s travel arrangements had already been made; they were paired up at random to avoid just that sort of whinging. And it was not as if Sherlock could assert his reason for it without selling out his teammate as a drug user, something he would never do. In the end it was less complicated to just grit his teeth and bear it, having made it clear to George evidence of his habit must be kept well out of Sherlock’s sight. Sherlock was tempted in various ways every day, regardless. The insistent lure of his own, tamed-down habits was nothing new, and Sherlock had but to resist it, as he had been doing for over five years. To coin a phrase, Sherlock must, as ever, keep clean and carry on.

In the end, he did not say anything  to John about George’s glass vial of cocaine or his handful of unbottled tranquiliser tablets. Save something to talk about between goes, in John’s hotel room in Vancouver. Soon.

 _Feel like talking?_ Sherlock texted, feeling confident his meaning would be received. _Talk me to sleep_.

Despite how easy it had been to predict and elicit, Sherlock nonetheless got a small thrill when his phone almost immediately broke into song, and his screen lit up with _Call from John Watson_. Sherlock tapped to answer but before he got a word out, John said, “Let me tell you all about how I’m going to eat your arse out for hours, when I see you.”

Sherlock did not protest.

 

_“Welcome back for period two of this Boston Brawlers game against the Seattle Aeros, the third game of this west-coast swing which will end with Sunday’s matinee against the Mountaineers in Vancouver, BC. With me tonight on BSN as always my partner Andy Brickley, with Molly Hooper at ice level. What did we think about that first period performance, Brick?”_

_“Well, the Brawlers D is a little overburdened due to a whole slew of injuries; veteran Pietr Kocur is playing huge minutes, along with Corey Hatch, while some recent call-ups do what they can to calm the nerves that come with playing in your first few NHL games. The forward lines tried their best to keep control of the puck, keep play in the Aeros’ end as much as possible, but with the issues rampant in the Boston defense, it’s almost no wonder Seattle has already scored twice against Sherlock Holmes, who had arguably too little support from his defensive lines out in front. It’ll be vital for the Brawlers’ offense to work hard, get some numbers on the board, and really put the pressure on to keep play in the Aeros defensive zone as much as they can, if they want any chance of coming back to win this hockey game.”_

_“The puck drops to start the second. . .”_

Sherlock crouched and narrowed his eyes as play moved toward him, a slow-paced ebb and flow as his team passed around the neutral zone, losing the puck then regaining control only to have it poked away or have a pass intercepted. Soon enough there were red sweaters flying his way, Brawlers in white giving chase and setting up to defend him.

_“Hollis passes around the boards and it’s picked up by Connor Lamm, he fakes the wrist, a soft pass to Merrick. Merrick to Hollis, walks it in, Kocur’s big body in his way, backhand shift back to Merrick, fires the bomb, save by Holmes. . .Loose in front! Hollis! Up high, and he scores. Sherlock Holmes appeals to the referee that he was interfered with, and it looks like we might get a review.”_

“Bullshit, Holmes, and you know it!” Merrick screamed at him, and Kocur got upright and solid in front of Sherlock’s paint, chest to chest, keeping Merrick out of Sherlock’s way. The goal celebration over, Lamm and Hollis started piling on.

“Just because you’re fucking slow don’t cry about interference,” Hollis ranted. “Good goal and you know it.”

Lamm skated a wide half-circle around the back of the goal chanting, “Yip. Yip. Yip. Yip.”

Kocur turned his focus on Lamm and shook off a glove; Lamm only shook his head and skated away. Mellon, ever the pest, poked Merrick repeatedly in the back with the blade of his stick. The linesmen buzzed around, trying to keep a fight from erupting.

Finally the ref skated out with news from Toronto.

“After review, there was no goaltender interference, the call on the ice stands—good goal.”

Sherlock cast a glance toward the bench, fully expecting to see coach Lestrade motioning for him to skate in and let LoPresti take over. Though Coach was grimacing, he stood still, with rolled-up papers in one hand, his arms crossed in front of his chest. Sherlock sprayed  a stream of water onto his face, a reminder to focus up, and slid his hand back into his catching glove.

_“. . .and the Boston Brawlers give up another one on the road. The Seattle Aeros take this one, five to two. Join us Sunday for a matinee game against Vancouver; coverage starts at one o’clock. On behalf of myself, Jack Edwards, Andy Brickley, and all of us at Boston Sports Network, good night.”_

Sherlock had spent that afternoon in a flat on the other side of town from the team’s hotel, with Steven the real estate developer, who obviously kept the place for the sole purpose of bringing men there for sex. They’d shared another rough-and-ready encounter that left Sherlock feeling mauled and used-up, wondering if he’d enjoyed himself.

“I don’t usually see a man more than once,” he’d said, even as Steven was already unbuttoning Sherlock’s shirt, backing him across the open-plan living space toward the back of the flat where the bedroom was stocked with condoms and lubricant and more ink-on-paper pornography than Sherlock thought necessary in the internet age.

“Am I supposed to feel special?” was Steven’s gravelly reply. Sherlock had scraped his fingertips through Steven’s beard, then down the back of his neck.

“Just a point of fact,” Sherlock said. “Interesting trivia.”

“Not that interesting.”

Steven had again requested permission to penetrate him, and again Sherlock had declined, though he didn’t hate the idea. Instead Steven lay on the bed with one hand behind his head like a reclining emperor, while Sherlock curled up beside his thigh and sucked his average-in-every-way prick. Steven’s free hand held Sherlock too tight by the ankle, then shoulder, and at last clenched hard around his wrist. Sherlock received no praise, nor even any real reciprocity. Once Steven had come on Sherlock’s chin and cheek, he watched with little interest as Sherlock jerked himself, then offered a disconcerting smirk in the wake of Sherlock’s orgasm that made him feel self-conscious.

Once they had cleaned up and dressed, with business-like distance and no conversation, Steven sat on the bed’s edge to put on his shoes while Sherlock buttoned his shirt cuffs.

“Leaving town soon, I imagine,” Steven offered, and Sherlock knew what might follow.

“Right after the game tonight,” Sherlock confirmed, then added somewhat snidely, “Do you want me to arrange tickets for you?”

Steven ignored the inquiry, went to a mirror to arrange his hair with a plastic comb.

“It’s not often I meet someone who stands to lose as much as I do. Are you interested in something regular?”

Sherlock didn’t know where to begin to explain how much in error Steven’s assumptions were. Then he wondered if it was even necessary to correct him. The silence grew, and Steven broke it rather than wait for a response from Sherlock.

“Haven’t we had a good time together? Guys like us are hard to come by; all I ever meet are these twenty-year-old twinks with girls’ eyebrows who want to dance down the middle of 15th Avenue. So think it over. You have my number. I can come to you now and then; I travel a lot anyway.”

A not-terribly crafty way to say his wife wouldn’t be suspicious. Sherlock wondered if he felt sorry for her, whoever she was.

By then they were in the front room, and Sherlock was being swept out the front door.

“You realise I wouldn’t hesitate to dance down the middle of 15th Street,” Sherlock prompted, correcting at least one of Steven’s misperceptions.

“Maybe not, but you’ve got a partner, right? Or is that over?”

“I have a partner,” Sherlock confirmed.

“Then the stakes are high for both of us.”

Sherlock wasn’t sure.

“Take care. Just think about it. Call me when you decide.”

Sherlock only nodded, and they shook hands.

And so Sherlock found himself thinking about it. Then thinking about why he hadn’t mentioned it to John, and knowing he wouldn’t be mentioning it to him when next they spoke. Once off the bus at the hotel after the game, he idly flicked a thumbnail against the corner of Steven’s business card in his coat pocket, despite knowing it would make him seem desperate if he stooped to contacting the man for the third time in two days.

George was in the elevator with him, listening to his wife on the phone and grunting affirmative, bored-sounding noises at whatever she was saying. Once he’d rung off he shrugged in Sherlock’s direction and offered some grim comfort.

“Our defense is a clown show right now; they should be working harder for you.”

Sherlock nodded vaguely. His failure belonged only to him, and he owned it. Though there was some truth to the idea he was playing a largely one-man game.

“If you need someone to take some shots at you in the next couple days, just let me know.”

“Thank you.”

“I know Thurty and Kocur have been working out with you. . .whatever you need, brother.”

“I appreciate it.”

George’s pupils were enormous. He rubbed his knuckles hard against his nose.

“Cold coming on?” Sherlock asked, knowing it was not the case. “I’m a bit of a germaphobe.”

“Yeah, no, I’m good,” George replied, balling up his fists and shoving them into the front pocket of his pullover sweatshirt. “Not catching.”

“Right.”

They let themselves into the suite and Sherlock went straight for the kitchenette’s worktop, where the two bottles he’d consumed had been replaced with new ones. His packet of cigarettes was still wrapped and hadn’t been touched. He tapped his fingertips restlessly against it, contemplated picking it up. In the end, he took a bottle and the corkscrew and started for his bedroom, still in his coat.

“What’s our wake-up call time?” George asked, staring into the mini-fridge but ultimately coming up empty-handed.

“I think half-six.”

“What’s that in real time?”

“Ask your virtual assistant to translate it. Good night.”


	17. Chapter 17

Sherlock was waiting in the lobby of the hotel when John arrived, pulling a wheeled suitcase and wearing a Thrashers t-shirt under his open jacket.

“Well, hello,” John smiled at him, and they embraced, one arm each, more like friends. Sherlock took the handle of his case and stood by while John checked in. “Flight was OK?”

“Bit early,” Sherlock complained. “I slept a bit.” He took a half-step forward, pasted on a friendly expression. “Mr Watson recently had his number retired by the Hamilton Thrashers; this weekend is a bit of a celebratory holiday for him. I wonder if there’s anything special we can arrange.”

John rolled his eyes, smiling away. “You’re shameless,” he chided, then to the desk clerk said, “It’s fine, don’t mind him.”

“I can upgrade you to a single-bedroom suite,” she replied, untroubled, perhaps amused. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. You don’t have to.”

“Not at all, Mr Watson, I’m happy to. I’ll also have a bottle of champagne sent up. Would you like a brunch basket as well?”

John could barely contain laughter. “Brunch basket? Sure, why not? Bring on the brunch basket. Sherlock, put your card down.”

“I wouldn’t insult—” he squinted at the clerk’s name tag, “Bailey by suggesting I pay for the things she’s generously offered as gifts in honour of your accomplishment.”

“Because you asked her to!”

“It’s really no trouble,” the clerk—Bailey—insisted. “Here’s your key card; the WiFi password is inside the packet. You’ll be in suite 1450, which is on the seventh floor, elevators just there, when you come out upstairs just take a right all the way to the end of the corridor. I’ve sent the request to room service to bring up the brunch basket for two and a bottle of champagne. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Thank you, no. You’re very kind.” John gave Sherlock a look indicating he found Sherlock’s brazen appeals for freebies outrageous, and perhaps a bit cute.

“If there’s anything else I can do to make your stay more comfortable, please just dial zero-one for the front desk and let me know.”

John fished in his pocket and came up with a handful of folded bills. He shuffled quickly then started to offer her a quarter-folded twenty. Sherlock intervened, liberating a fifty, which he handed over. The clerk tried to refuse but in the end accepted with profuse thanks, though her gaze darted between them, unsure who exactly she should be grateful to.

“You’ve been very helpful,” John told her. “Thanks again.” As the two turned away from the desk, John dug his elbow into Sherlock’s ribs. “You minx.”

“You owe me.”

“What, brunch?”

“Something like that.”

They felt obligated to wait for the room service waiter to bring whatever bonuses Sherlock had scored on John’s behalf, though it was intensely frustrating to do so. Sherlock had a growling need, wanted to dig in his claws and clamp John down and just. . . _do things_ to him.

John made no secret he was up the same tree.

“Soon as we’re alone for good I’m going to bend you over that desk and lick your arse until you’re begging.”

Sherlock started undressing. “They’d better get here soon or they’ll find me braced and waiting,” he threatened, and he could already feel the way his hands would stick and slide on the polished surface of the desk, and how his calf muscles would strain as he rose up on his toes.

John had the cash for the gratuity already clenched in his fist, and he paced in front of the door, looking at his watch.

“Just hang the Do Not Disturb sign,” Sherlock insisted, lifting his ankle in front of his opposite knee and stooping to peel off his sock. His shirt was on the floor. His nipples were hard.

“They’ll just knock anyway,” John grouched. Sherlock reached for his trouser buttons and John held up a hand. “Wait, let me do that.”

“Can’t wait,” Sherlock protested.

“Please.”

Sherlock sucked a breath. He sat on the edge of desk with one jiggling foot on the chair, and waited.

Mercifully, there came a knock, and John opened the door before it had finished sounding. He let the uniformed man wheel in a cart laden with food—including a basket of baked goods enough to feed eight people or two hockey players, and a bucket of ice embracing a bottle of champagne. The bellman offered to open the bottle but John declined, shoved a folded bill at him, and practically chased him out the door.

“The sign,” Sherlock prompted, as John was about to shut it. John affixed the Do Not Disturb card to the door handle, let the door fall shut on its own as he quick-marched across the room to where Sherlock sat, took his place between Sherlock’s splayed thighs, kneeing aside the rolling desk chair as Sherlock wrapped his legs around Johns thighs, shoved his hands up under John’s t-shirt front to stroke his chest and shoulders as they kissed, hot and deep.

John took his time finishing what Sherlock had begun—so slow to finish undressing him that Sherlock regretted his column of maddening buttons rather than a quick and dirty zip—employing a slow reveal that had Sherlock humming frustrated impatience through bitten lips. John liked him partly-dressed—or mostly dressed—but they’d been long days and nights apart and Sherlock was ready to get on with it. Just when he was about to voice a grumbling protest and strip both of them with all necessary force, John peeled open his front placket and took Sherlock’s rapidly thickening prick deep in his mouth, his tongue curl-sliding, not entirely careful with the edges of his teeth. Sherlock sucked a loud hiss of breath and grabbed hard at John’s shoulder.

Seated on the rolling leather desk chair, bent deeply forward, John went on teasing Sherlock’s cock to life with open-mouthed kisses, even as he tucked his fingers into Sherlock’s waistband and began urging down his trousers, humming encouragement when he had breath and space for it. Sherlock gathered John’s t-shirt by handfuls at his back and pulled it up, up, finally over and off when John pulled away to get his breath.

“Turn around,” John low-growled, and patted the desk top. “Sling a knee up here for me.”

Sherlock needed no second invitation and did as he was told. Within moments he was bracing himself with a flat palm against the wall in front of him, closing his eyes each time he caught sight of his face reflected in the glass of a picture frame hanging there. John’s fingers held him open, and with lips and tongue, he thoroughly reacquainted himself with every sucking, flicking, swirling way to elicit shudders and groans from Sherlock. For his part, Sherlock found a counter-sensation in the form of a sizable, fairly-fresh bruise on his shin, which he worked against the desk’s edge to spark it up. A shift of John’s posture moved the chair so that Sherlock could just barely settle his toes on its arm, a change of balance that let him rock against John’s probing tongue.

John panted and hummed against him, laving a wide tongue over his hole to wet it, then licking the wet back into his mouth. Sherlock cursed and his hand against the wall slipped; he was sweating; his muscles were trembling. John drew away, one hand on Sherlock’s hip, and glancing over his shoulder Sherlock watched John shove two blunt fingers deep into his mouth, roll his tongue around them, and slip them out again. The next moment, they were pressing against him, trying to open him.

“Fuck!”

Sherlock collapsed; hands and elbows on the desktop, head hanging from his bent neck, and he kept still until he couldn’t anymore, then leaned in to John’s motion.

“Gorgeous.”

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck. . .”

“You do it,” John murmured, and brushed his lips against Sherlock’s low back before leaning away again. “You do what you like.” He turned his wrist. “Go on. Let me see.”

“Do that,” Sherlock bit back at him. “Keep doing that.”

John obliged with a gentle twisting motion, neither in nor out—but so far in, perfectly far in—and Sherlock bit his fist, whimpered, and writhed.

“So tight,” John marveled, and went on working Sherlock’s hole, leaned in to spit and lick around his knuckles. It didn’t help. Sherlock didn’t care. “Fuck, I want you dripping with slick,” John muttered, a rush of hot breath across Sherlock’s buttock that cooled his evaporating saliva in the crease. “Fuck these thighs,” he suggested, sounding pleased and decisive. He dragged fingertips down Sherlock’s quivering outer thigh, then up the inside, which made Sherlock shiver away. John withdrew his fingers and quickly stood to press himself against Sherlock’s back, kissing and biting at his shoulder and the back of his neck. Sherlock groaned pleasure as he unbent his knee to set his foot on the floor.

John ran a hand up between his thighs, slid the flat of his fingers in and out between them just below Sherlock’s bum, intimating what he wished to do next. Sherlock met his own eyes reflected in the picture’s glass, and the skin of his scalp and arms crawled with memory, which would never do.

“I’ve a better idea,” he said, and lifted himself away from the desk, turned, and shoved John backward. Once John was arranged to Sherlock’s liking on the sofa, trousers around his ankles, shoulders back and hips forward, and Sherlock had fished packets of slippery from the hip pocket of his own, left-behind trousers, Sherlock knelt wide across John’s lap and held him fast, slid down on him. They both groaned. John used the strength of his grip to help bolster Sherlock’s motion; every muscle in his thighs and belly strained to raise and lower him.

When they came, it was loud and harsh, nearly simultaneous; they were pent-up and fiery and it was no wonder neither could hold off very long. Sherlock’s hand around the edge of John’s neck probably held too tight; John was careless, wiped Sherlock’s cum off his hand onto the sofa cushion. Sherlock knew John would regret it later when his senses returned, probably try to clean it, leave the housekeeper a ridiculous gratuity when they checked out.

Sherlock felt boneless and blissful—of course, his man was a wonder—and after some awkward rearrangement, they found space to share the length of the sofa, eyes closed, John’s arm draped possessively around Sherlock’s waist. He was smiling. Sherlock wanted to sink into the sensation of weighty exhaustion, sleep away a few hours, wake up and fuck again, then eat, then fuck, then sleep, eat, fuck their way through the next three days. What was wanted and what was required were, tragically, so seldom one in the same. He rolled his head against the sofa’s arm, searching for a clock.

Groaning in a wholly different manner than he had done not ten minutes earlier, Sherlock stroked a hand firmly up the length of John’s arm. “I have to get to the rink.”

John’s eyes stayed shut but he knitted his eyebrows together. “What? Why?”

“One-on-one time with Razor.” Andy Raynham was the head goalie-coach. “I think a couple of the equipment guys are going to take some shots.”

Sleepily, with some effort evident in it, John said, “I’ll come.”

“Stay and have a kip. Find us a good place to have dinner,” Sherlock told him. John kissed him on the shoulder.

“No, I’ll come. Someone’ll have some skates I can borrow.”

“Not for those tiny doll feet,” Sherlock teased.

“Oi.”

“Nevermind, I like your little feet.”

“Seriously, I want to come. Unless you really don’t want me to.”

Sherlock considered it as quickly as he could. John was the one man in the world who was one-hundred percent on Sherlock’s side, but the fact was Sherlock’s on-ice struggles embarrassed him. He didn’t want John to see him at less than his best. John looked at him then, and Sherlock found he couldn’t say no.

“All right then,” Sherlock acquiesced. “Let’s hit the showers.”

“You go ahead; if I get in there with you I’m liable to keep you there too long.”

“So soon? Was that not enough to satisfy you?” Sherlock smirked.

“If I could get hard again this quickly I’d already be pulling your ankles up on my shoulders,” John told him, and Sherlock shivered something like an orgasm aftershock. Mugging, John stated the obvious, “I’ve missed you.”

Sherlock growled frustration and rolled away before they got carried off on that particular tangent.

 

“Aw’right, Holmes, let’s work top shelf a little. Stick side high is biting you in the ass lately.”

Sherlock muttered into his glove. “You should be so lucky to bite me in the ass,” which made little objective sense but made him feel better.

To the three guys firing on him—John, Mellon, and Bouchard—Raynham called out, “Go stick side high, one out of three. Fire away.”

Sherlock crouched and settled, working from his right to his left, while the three took shots at him, a random assortment of high and low shots, with a third of them aimed at and above his right shoulder. A rhythm was established, giving him just enough time between shots to look for the next one. He saved anything they threw at the five hole, all but one down low on either side of his leg pads, and most of the shots up top, on his glove side or in the middle. Out of about twenty, he only saved one that came in high on his right.

“What’s the feeling there, Holmes?” Raynham asked, skating across to him as Sherlock lifted his mask. “Are you seeing them?”

“I see them.”

“How’s the mobility in that right shoulder? Anything bothering you? How about the wrist, got a good grip on the stick?”

“Shoulder’s fine. Grip’s fine.” Sherlock was beyond frustrated; there was no reason for him to be missing pucks at all, let alone in one particular area of his goal. “It just depends where I am; they get me low to the glove side and I can’t get across fast enough. Or they’re shooting backhands and even they don’t know where the hell that’s going to end up.”

“Maybe so,” Raynham allowed, though Sherlock felt he was being patronised. “But I’m looking at where the pucks are getting by you, and we can’t ignore there’s a weak spot. The rest of your game looks good. But if we can just dig into this issue a little, and at least rule out some possible reasons, we might figure out how to make sure you look good all over the net, you know?”

“I do look good,” Sherlock smirked.

Raynham played along. “I don’t know; all guys look the same to me.” He thumped Sherlock on the shoulder pad. “Just. . .you see what I’m saying? Maybe you need to work on some physical therapy or—have you had your eyes checked lately? Peripheral vision?”

“Dwelling on it is only making me more tense,” Sherlock said, and the manner in which he felt it was significantly more intense than the words he used. All the attention to his failures was, to use the common parlance, freaking him out.

“I’m not trying to get in your head, Holmes,” Raynham tried to reassure him. “I just want to make sure we’re looking at everything.”

“Right.”

Skating toward the three men tossing pucks back and forth at the top of the circles, giving Sherlock privacy while he was being coached, Raynham called out, “Fire at will, guys. Five minutes, and I’ll let you go.”

Sherlock twitched right and left, made some catches, saved a couple in his usual weak spot—armpit, blocker side—knelt, stood, stacked the pads, got the stick on it. Two more went in over his shoulder. Raynham blew his whistle and Sherlock bumped gloves with Mellon and Bouchard. John skated up and helped himself to Sherlock’s water bottle.

“How many times did I score on you when I was playing in Hamilton?” John wondered.

“Six,” Sherlock replied, confident of the statistic.

John looked pleased with himself, nodded, frowning, as he skated in curlicues around the crease. “Not bad.”

“On fifty-eight shots,” Sherlock added.

John laughed and took a few long strides away, skated in fast to spray Sherlock with snow.

“Let me buy you dinner,” John suggested. “Then take you to bed.”

Sherlock gathered his glove and blocker off the top of his goal and gladly followed his man off the ice and back out into the world.


	18. Chapter 18

“Morning,” Sherlock murmured, nuzzling his face up under John’s arm, shamelessly digging his nose into the hair, nipping at the tendon that emerged as John lifted his elbow to accommodate him.

“Time’s it?” John pushed at his head, flinched from the tickling of Sherlock’s hair against his skin.

“Early,” Sherlock told him. “Seven forty-something.”

“Practice this morning?”

“Optional skate. I’m exercising my option.” He ran his palm down John’s torso, then up, across his chest, over his belly.

“Mm, good,” John hummed, and arched his back, groaning into the stretch.

“You really _aren’t_ my captain anymore,” Sherlock joked. “You’d have shamed me for that, not six months ago.”

“One of the benefits of being just the boyfriend, not the teammate. Now when I boss you about, it’s only for fun.”

Sherlock kissed a triplet-trail along John’s bicep, then moved to leave the bed. “I’m ordering breakfast, cleaning my teeth, then we’ll see if we can get off in time not to greet the room service waiter naked.”

“A genius plan,” John agreed.

Sherlock could barely stand to let John out of his sight, insisted they stay in bed most of the day. They had a no-frills morning tryst, donned track pants and hotel robes while they ate a massive breakfast at a round wood table beside the window, shared the shower, then returned to the bed to recuperate. John scrolled his phone while Sherlock scanned the television channels, which offered not much of interest. He settled on an interior design competition program; it always interested him to watch people do what they did best—the further the skill from his own experience, the better.

“I’ll open a bottle?” Sherlock wondered, snugging himself up against John’s side, mashing piles of pillows until they were comfortably nested together.

“Bit early for me, but go on, if you like,” John replied. Sherlock only hummed, not wanting to disarrange them so soon after tucking them in. “Oh, hey,” John said then, as if remembering something he’d meant to say earlier. “Did your agent call you?”

Sherlock immediately assumed the worst, that John had been browsing league news and there was something in the press about Sherlock being busted to the AHL, or being put on leave, or traded.

“No, why?”

“Don’t sound so edgy, it’s a good thing. Mine forwarded me a message from those girls with the blog. BSN approached them about developing a television show.”

Sherlock was relieved for himself—sickeningly so—and pleased for Mike and Mags. “Ah, excellent,” he said.

“What did you think I was going to say?” John asked, and put his phone aside, dropped a kiss in Sherlock’s hair. His voice was soothing; Sherlock closed his eyes.

“No. Nothing.”

“You’re not doing yourself any favours feeding this beast,” John reminded him gently. “Everything’s as it should be; you know that. You’re the one who taught it to me.”

Sherlock had a mental list of things he wanted to do just then, none of which was of any benefit to him, but all of which held a promise of distracting him from his current job-related distress.

“A day in bed with you is one of the best things I can think of, and I am in no way complaining,” John told him, “But tomorrow we’re going to find something to do. Out there in the world. Something new and interesting and that we won’t soon forget.”

“ _Mmm_ ,” Sherlock murmured. “What’s his name?”

“Very funny. I’m serious. You need a brain-break.”

John was trying to shake him out of his funk, without being obnoxious or cruel. He was as wise as he was kind. Not to mention that he was nude, gorgeous, allowing Sherlock to tangle their limbs and invade his space. If Sherlock had perhaps never felt much of what other people told him happiness felt like, he reckoned he might just then have come as close as ever he had. Sherlock caressed John’s forearm, lifted John’s hand to his lips and kissed the backs of his fingers.

“What do you have in mind?” Sherlock asked.

“I actually have no idea, but now that it’s out there, I guess I’d better find something.” He laughed a bit, and reached for his phone, began typing with his thumb, narrating carefully, “Fun. Unforgettable. Things to do. . .near me.”

“I can think of one,” Sherlock grinned.

 

What John found for them to do was surprisingly in line with his assertions they would do something new, interesting, and unforgettable: a massive pedestrian suspension bridge over a river, and an adjacent park with a truly harrowing cliffwalk featuring narrow walkways jutting out from the cliff face, hovering in mid-air well above the level of the treetops. The day was clear and mild so they were lightly dressed, and the views were shocking in their expansive natural beauty.

“Here, lean back here,” Sherlock prompted, wanting to take a selfie of the two of them with nothing but air and treetops in the background. The metal railings were strung with mesh nets, at a slight angle so that the walkways took on a v-shape.

“Not on your life,” John replied. He was stood smack in the middle of the walkway, with one hand on each rail, his knuckles white and his face pale. Sherlock gave himself a little inward scold for not having noticed; they’d stepped out onto the precarious-looking structure at least fifteen minutes earlier.

“Are you afraid of heights?” Sherlock asked, and tried not to smile, lest John think he was taking the piss out of him. In reality, he was impressed with John’s courage at not having shown the least hint of anxiety to that point.

“It’s better when I’m moving. Standing still is giving me a little vertigo,” John told him. “I don’t feel like I could die at any moment—who told you that? This is fine.” He was joking but his expression was grim. Sunglasses blocked Sherlock’s view of his eyes, but the corners of his lips turned down in a distinct frown.

“In that case, let’s walk,” Sherlock told him.

“Oh, I don’t know,” John replied, playing it off. “Now I’m sort of stuck here. Hopefully the fall will kill me before I hit the ground.”

Sherlock, standing in front of him, knew he had to get him moving not only because they couldn’t live on a wooden scaffold several yards out from the face of a cliff, but because the walkway was so narrow that anyone coming up behind them would have trouble moving around them—particularly given the fact John did not seem inclined to let go of even one of the handrails.

“Look,” Sherlock prompted, briefly casting his glance over his own shoulder, about ten yards ahead of them around a curve. “There’s a platform, quite close in to the cliff. A good place to stop and breathe.”

“Enjoy it. Send me a postcard.”

Sherlock took another tack. “Look up. Let’s look up for a minute and see what we see.”

John attempted a deep inhalation but it was clear he was so tense his body would not allow it. Sherlock vaguely worried he might hyperventilate and pass out. The colour in his face was very poor indeed.

Sherlock put his hand on top of John’s, and directed his gaze upward toward the cliff. There was not much to see; too high for birds, too rocky for plants. “That bit looks like the Shard,” Sherlock said, pointing to direct John’s attention.

John hummed and shifted his grip beneath Sherlock’s hand.

“Keep looking up,” Sherlock told him. He could see a small clot of eco-tourists in hiking shoes and trousers with ridiculous numbers of pockets rounding the bend behind them. “The last time you scored on me was in Hamilton, three years ago.”

John let out a quick, breathless laugh. “You don’t remember,” he insisted.

“Of course I do. The Thrashers had control to my right, high in the circle. Our defensive pair were Siven and Ross, but they were gassed, looking for a change. I figured if they got the puck they’d ice it just to get a rest. You were up high to my left, waiting near the blue line. Hamilton had a huge amount of zone time, something like thirty-nine seconds, putting intense pressure on us.”

“We were objectively better than you guys that year,” John put in, and Sherlock tightened the grip on the back of his hand and began to slowly persuade it along the rail, taking a half-step backwards, urging John to follow him.

“True enough; You were fifty-two, thirty, and three; we finished the regular season forty-six, twenty-nine, and ten.”

“How in the hell do you remember that?” John demanded. The corners of his mouth softened slightly upward, and by then they’d taken three steps together, John’s face still turned up toward the surface of the cliff.

“I have some memory tools I use. Anyway, Bouchard was poking at the puck-handler—it was Gregory Lewan—but couldn’t get at it. Thurston made a move to help out, lost an edge, and ended up on his back. The shooting lane opened, Lewan made a sneaky pass back your way, and you slapped it low to my glove side. I had to slide and stack my pads, but it rang the post beside my skate blade and went in.”

John was truly smiling by then, and they were only a few steps away from the promised platform and a less dramatic exposure to open space. “Did we win?”

“No,” Sherlock told him. “But yours was the tying goal; it was early in the third. We won in OT.” Sherlock took one backward step and was on the platform—barely less terrifying than the narrow walkway, but at least there was a low, wooden-plank wall on one side rather than the wide-open sensation of the mesh railings—and John’s body gave up tension as he stepped onto it. He gripped Sherlock by the elbow. Sherlock asked, “All right?”

“How did you do that?” John demanded. “You’re clever; you tricked me.”

“Let it be a lesson to you,” Sherlock replied. There was a protruding overlook, about twenty feet long, with a floor made of glass which reminded Sherlock—perhaps too much—of a diving platform. “Shall we walk out there?” he joked.

“Absolutely not,” John said on a gust of breath. His cheeks were more pink, less pale, and Sherlock thought the threat of an imminent faint had passed. “Here, let’s do your picture.” He pulled Sherlock by the elbow and arranged them side by side with their backs to the wide-open vista of trees and blue sky, one hand wrapped firmly around the handrail on the cliff side of the wooden catwalk. Sherlock drew his phone from his pocket and got the shot of the two of them, smiling, standing together in the sky.

“It’s better when you’re walking?” Sherlock prompted.

“Yeah.”

“In that case, let’s go. If anyone gets in our way, we’ll just walk over them.”

John released the rail to squeeze Sherlock’s hand, with affection, and they began to walk, Sherlock in the lead and John close behind with both hands on the railings.

“Quick as we can. If we survive, I’ll buy dinner.”

“I know just the place. It’s a revolving rooftop place, fortieth story—”

“Nope!”

 

“Game day,” Sherlock announced, and drew the covers up around his shoulders to keep in their body heat. John was already awake beside him, looking at his phone, which he put face down on the bedside table.

“You’re going to kill it,” John told him.

“If it doesn’t kill me first,” Sherlock replied, a bit of a sing-song joke in it; he was trying his damnedest to ignore his doubts and focus on the work. It was just another game, just another sixty minutes doing the same job he’d been doing for years.

“Looking forward to seeing you play,” John told him. “Thurston texted asking if we want to meet up for breakfast before the bus leaves.”

“What did you say?”

“That I’d ask you.”

“Normally I’d beg off,” Sherlock said. “But is this a teammate invitation, or a boyfriend of your sister invitation?”

“Not sure. He didn’t mention anyone else, but it could be a team thing.”

“I can have breakfast with your sister’s boyfriend. I can’t have breakfast with my teammates.”

John rubbed his foot against Sherlock’s shin, beneath the wonderfully weighty blankets. “I’ll just tell him no, then, just in case.”

“You can go without me,” Sherlock allowed.

“Not when I have to say goodbye to you again so soon,” John said. Sherlock and the team would fly back to Boston immediately after that day’s game; John’s flight left later in the day and would get him back on the east coast in the earliest hours of the next morning, and he had a short turnaround before a lunchtime speaking engagement. He picked up his phone and typed a text to Thurston as Sherlock made his way to the bathroom.

Upon his return, he found John had thrown back the blankets and was lazily stroking his upright prick in his left fist. “Give a bloke a hand?” he asked, with a slight smile in Sherlock’s direction.

Sherlock gave him a hand, and much more.

 

That night, Sherlock let by four goals and the Brawlers would return to Boston with another loss in the books. After his shower, Sherlock found a note in his locker to report to coach Lestrade’s office Tuesday morning at nine o’clock.


	19. Chapter 19

LoPresti would get the next four starts, full stop, no chance of Sherlock stepping back in as lead goaltender during any of those games. During his early-morning meeting with the coach, he was once again instructed to check in with Whitehouse for some conditioning, Raynham for goalie-coaching, and Lestrade made a valiant attempt at building him up rather than berating him. Sherlock felt certain he would have been more comfortable taking heat; something about his coach’s reassurances and expressions of confidence made him uneasy. Lestrade’s reminders that Sherlock was one of the reasons he’d taken the job as Brawlers’ head coach, and that _you’re my guy, Holmes, no worries, I’m behind you a thousand percent_ , gave off a distinct whiff of desperation, as if Lestrade’s personal happiness—not just his professional pride—hung on Sherlock getting his shit together to keep the team on the right side of the win/loss record.

He dressed and even led the team out to the ice—team-wide superstition preventing them from implementing too many changes to the usual routines—then took his seat on the stool at the end of the bench, wearing a ball cap instead of his mask, his sticks lined up in the rack behind the equipment manager. He cheered his teammates, chirped at his opponents when he could, kept on being his brothers’ brother. LoPresti started on a win streak. Sherlock worked on explosive movement and twitch muscle response with Whitehouse every morning; added a fifteen-minute seated meditation to his game day routine; took shots from teammates and hangers-about during extra, off-hours practice sessions. He slept five or six non-consecutive hours each night, let John massage his feet while they watched television, smoked cigarettes out the window while John was out at foundation meetings and giving talks. Drank wine with lunch.

At last John was cornered into introducing Sherlock to his writing coach and editor, Iain Westcott, the professor with enough time on his hands to attend John’s talks on weekdays. Apparently. They ran into John’s poet in the middle of Boston Common—Sherlock and John on their way back to the flat from a movie theatre on the edge of Chinatown, Iain walking to one of the classes he taught at Emerson College, also on the edge of Chinatown. John hugged him, which Sherlock found unusually demonstrative, and Iain offered Sherlock a handshake and told him he’d heard so much about him from John.

“We should get together for a drink sometime,” Iain suggested, once they had dispensed with the dull small talk of where are you headed, I’ve heard mixed things about that film, hate how early it gets dark now.

Sherlock could read Iain from his newsboy-capped head to his frayed messenger bag to his low-end-of-upscale shoes. He was making a scant living, had at least two cats and at least two housemates, wrote longhand in an expensive notebook. He was single and queer and had a massive crush on Sherlock’s boyfriend. Not that Sherlock blamed him; John was manly, seductive, sex on legs. He himself had developed a similarly massive crush on John roughly four minutes after first speaking to him. So it was eminently understandable.

“I think Iain’s just asked you on a date right here in front of me,” Sherlock teased, knowing it might make Iain uncomfortable to know Sherlock saw him, plain as day. Sherlock was not jealous, but he found himself feeling territorial. Which he knew was hypocritical given he still had Steven the real estate developer’s business card in the pocket of his coat and had not yet officially declined his invitation to “something regular.”

“No! No,” Iain protested, waving his arms like a drowning man, surrendering. “I meant the three of us together.”

“Sherlock’s only joking,” John clarified, though he gave Sherlock a look indicating he could not believe what a prick Sherlock was being and could he please calm his tits.

“We’re not opposed to three-way dating,” Sherlock shrugged, ignoring John’s pointed look and Iain’s self-conscious defense of his motives.

“Sherlock, honestly,” John said. “Not everyone is a slag like us. Don’t be shocking just for the sake of it.”

“I’m not shocked,” Iain assured.

“I like to cast a wide net,” Sherlock said, with exaggerated casualness. “You really never know until you ask. Didn’t I tell you weeks ago you should invite your poet-friend for a threesome?”

“Christ, Sherlock! He’s joking.” John was embarrassed but not actually angry. Even still, Sherlock thought it best not to press further lest he tip John over the edge, and so took his rhetoric down a few notches to the generally accepted conversational level.

“I am, of course,” he said, and even slouched his posture down a bit to indicate how very unthreatening his sexuality was. He squeezed Iain’s shoulder and let go. “I’m only joking. A drink sounds lovely. Some night when I’m in town, and between games.”

“Busy time of year, but after I’ve submitted my grades for the semester, maybe. Between Christmas and New Year’s? Something like that?” Iain the queer poet was rolling with it; Sherlock sensed he would be willing to do much, if it meant spending time with John. More than a crush, then.

They made tentative non-plans and let each other go. Once they’d walked far enough that there was no risk of Iain overhearing, John complained, “What was that all about? You embarrassed him. Purposely.”

“I don’t think I did.”

“Even if not, you were trying.”

Sherlock looked at the ground ahead of him as they walked, could feel John’s gaze on him. “It was just too easy,” he said. “And some in-built masculine need for territorial pissings reared its head, I suppose.”

“Oh, are we doing jealousy now?” John asked, not arguing, more amused.

“Not that,” Sherlock corrected. He wanted to ask John whether he’d slept with his poet/editor/greatest fan, but bit down on it for no reason he could have explained. “I’ll apologise when we have that drink.”

“I hardly think that’s likely to happen,” John said quickly.

“The apology? Or the drink?”

“Neither, but I meant the drinks thing.”

Sherlock harrumphed at the implication he’d been so unforgivably naughty John was unwilling to subject Iain to more time in his company.

“Anyway,” John said, the change of subject telegraphed in his tone of voice. “What are we doing for dinner?”

“We’ll stop at Sage’s on the way and pick up something to cook,” Sherlock suggested. Cooking for John would stand in for the apology Sherlock should probably already have made to him. Sherlock liked to cook for him; he was always so impressed even by simple dishes, and was generous with humming and lip-smacking noises, sometimes even groaning pleasure that gave Sherlock two kinds of thrill at once.

“The meatball sandwiches,” John asserted, his tone indicating for Sherlock to disagree would mean John would carry on pretending annoyance.

Sherlock smiled at the pavement ahead of him. “Whatever you like.”

 

The next day was a game day against the New Jersey Demons at home, followed by a flight to play the Vikings in the Brawlers’ last game before their short holiday break of Christmas eve, Christmas day, and Boxing day. Sherlock had not been told whether he would get his tensely-awaited start, but he doubted so, given that LoPresti was on a hot streak and Sherlock was still letting shots go in over his right shoulder in practice sessions. John could not arrange a flight in time to attend the game in New Jersey;  Sherlock would meet him in Hamilton for Christmas eve and the next morning with his sister Kim.

In the dressing room at the Garden, Alex George streaked past Sherlock, the distinctive smell of amphetamine seeping loudly from his pores. Sherlock’s nose rumpled in disgust, though elsewhere in his body he felt a terrible twang of desire. He kept to his own routine, checking his equipment before donning it, listening to his teammates gossip and good-naturedly chirp each other, heavy rock music throbbing from someone’s speakers. Despite his attempt to mind his business, Sherlock kept one eye on George, whose shoulders jerked and shivered, and whose mouth wouldn’t stay closed.

LoPresti arrived then, at the next locker over, huffing as if he’d jogged the whole way from his car. He dropped his duffel and started unbuttoning his suit jacket.

“You’re looking pretty casual,” he commented.

Sherlock sniffed. “Dressing to sit doesn’t inspire me to work fast.”

“Dude, you’re starting.”

Sherlock drew his head back, frowning. “No. You’re on a streak.”

LoPresti laughed. “No one told you? You don’t know why I’m late?”

Sherlock felt suspicious he may be the butt of some prank. “No. . .” he said slowly.

“My wife had our baby this afternoon. Like four hours ago,” LoPresti reported. “I’ve been awake for two days; I’m wrecked.”

Sherlock, still disconcerted not to have been told earlier he was starting, somehow remembered he should congratulate the new father, and did so, with a handshake and what he thought must be the appropriate questions about gender and a name (a girl, Sophia, mother and baby both doing well). As the rest of the team swarmed to offer congratulations, Sherlock, in hockey pants and compression t-shirt, went looking for independent verification he was back in good graces thanks to the arrival of a person whose age was still measured only in hours.

Lestrade was headed up the corridor toward him as Sherlock left the dressing room.

“Holmes, you’re up,” he said.

“So I’ve heard,” he replied, then joked, “Bit of short notice; I actually had other plans.”

“Yeah, no doubt you did. By the time I got word about LoPresti’s baby being born, it was already almost four; I reckoned you were probably on your way in. Wanted to get down here sooner to tell you but I got stuck in an ambush, men’s-room meeting with the GM.” He clapped Sherlock on the shoulder. “You’re good to go,” he said rather than asked. “All I hear from Razor is that you’re doing the right things, I’ve seen you in practice, you’re good.”

“Are you reassuring me, or yourself?” Sherlock asked, though he did not want either of those answers. The two walked together back into the dressing room.

Lestrade carried on as if Sherlock had not cracked the grim joke. “Too bad about LoPresti’s streak but he asked not to start, and if he’s not a hundred percent, I’m not going to risk putting him in.”

Sherlock nodded, feeling stunned. Coach Lestrade had clearly finished with him, was drawing LoPresti into a bear hug and thumping his back. There was nothing for it but to get his head in the game, so Sherlock turned back around and went to find a wall to look at while he emptied his mind for a few minutes.

_“Late in the first, we’re still scoreless here at the Boston Garden. The Brawlers are actually lucky, in a sense, Brick, given that the Demons have outshot them—fourteen to four, so far in this period—and goaltender Sherlock Holmes has made some huge saves.”_

_“This game could easily be three to nothing, Jack, you’re right about that. Brawlers’ D not looking very alert so far; I imagine they’ll be hearing some choice words from head coach Greg Lestrade at the intermission. Holmes has come up big, making the right saves at the right time to hold off the Demons, who had some excellent scoring chances, from Radzinski and Furney.”_

Sherlock didn’t feel out of sorts. He didn’t even feel normal. If asked, he’d have said he felt nothing. He as an unthinking machine, doing just what it was programmed to do. It was almost as if he was watching himself, which was a strange sensation, detached from the game in a way he had not experienced before. But he was watching himself getting big as a house, diving, throwing up the catching glove, making save after save. There would be plenty of time later to analyse what his brain was up to; in the moment, he decided to let his body do its work.

_“Nine minutes into the second, and these two teams are playing at lightning speed up and down the ice. Brawlers lead one-nil on the sneaky wraparound goal by Shane Thurston, off Sullivan’s pass. Traffic getting heavy through the neutral zone, Carroll stick-handles through the jam into the Boston end, with Milton up the middle and Radzinski coming fast up the boards. Carroll sweeps it to Radzinski, Radzinski walks it in, shoots down low. Save by Holmes. Bouncing rebound. Carroll off the backhand, Holmes comes way out of his crease to knock it down, smothers it, he’ll take the faceoff.”_

Hovering over his own shoulder, Sherlock congratulated himself for getting halfway through the game without shitting the bed. He avoided looking at the scoreboard, just to keep from jinxing himself and his team. Sprayed his face with his water bottle, fired some into his mouth, spit it across his crease.

_“There’s the siren to end the second, and the Brawlers have three on the board, while the New Jersey Demons find themselves in the unpleasant position of needing to score one every five minutes in the third to win it.”_

The third period was a blaring blur of bodies moving toward and away from him, the glare of the ice, the chaotic jangle of the crowd—even the droning moan of Sherlock’s fans shouting _, Hoooooolmes._ . .—and Sherlock would not let himself acknowledge that the way he was playing, and the way the Brawlers’ offense was doing its best to keep control in the New Jersey end, he might come up with not just a win, but a shutout.

He called out to Bouchard, skating the long way around to take a defensive-end faceoff. Bouchard glided up close and Sherlock quickly told him, “Furney is terrified of you and will jump the gun to get thrown out. When Carroll comes in, he’ll hesitate. Throw back to Hatch and skate like hell.”

Bouchard grinned at him. “Good to have you back, man.”

“Fuck off.”

“Like I said!”

_“Clock ticking down with less than two minutes left to play. Kushner breaks for the bench and the Demons get the extra skater. Pressure’s on the Brawlers’ defense, Thurston puts a big hit on Radzinski to make the play, and Sullivan picks up the puck, skates it up toward the blue line, fires it a mile and the shot goes wide of the goal. Furney there to retrieve it and both teams make full changes. Up the middle comes Furney, Kocur with the long reach tries to poke it away, forty-five seconds to go, Furney tape to tape to Carroll, he passes back to Furney, now across to Radzinski, some jousting going on in front of the net of Sherlock Holmes, as Shane Thurston gives Furney a couple of playground shoves. Carroll shoots the one-timer, deflection, picked up by Radzinski, skates it around behind the goal, loses control and the puck rolls on its edge out to center. Thurston tries to get a stick on it, can’t control it, here’s Kocur, the massive slapshot from a hundred and sixty feet, and SCORES on the empty net. They let the clock bleed down the final four seconds and the Boston Brawlers have a shutout win, four nothing, on the strength of a big showing tonight from goaltender Sherlock Holmes, who really covered the Brawlers’ backsides in the first, and just kept coming up big. He’ll get his forty-second career shutout. We’ll see you Tuesday night in Charlotte for our last game before the holiday break.”_

Bump after bump of his teammates’ helmets against his own should have rattled Sherlock’s brain a little, but he only heard the thuds distantly. Kocur gave him a friendly shake of the head, and LoPresti patted his chest. He was the last to leave the ice, raised his stick at the fans as he was pronounced one of the night’s three star players on his way across the threshold and down the tunnel.

Once he got to his phone, there was a text waiting.

_TXT from JW: You brilliant man! That was fucking fantastic._

_Can I drive you home?_ Sherlock texted back.

_TXT from JW: Oh, yes. I have a special reward in mind for you._

_I’ll be there in twenty minutes._ It would be record time, but Sherlock felt it was worth a try. After all, he’d been coming up hot all night.

 

Sherlock pulled off, panting, a spider’s silk of spit from his lip to the crown of John’s cock. He cheated his knees a bit wider beside John’s chest, rolled his tongue to break the connection. As soon as they’d shed their clothes, John had fallen back on the bed and drawn Sherlock down—with firm hands on hips and thighs—to sit on John’s greedy mouth. Sherlock followed silent cues to grind his spread-open arse against John’s face until his prick was slick with dripping pre-cum smoothed along by his own hand. Long minutes were passed in that exalted formation, watching John’s cock grow harder and darker, thick-veined and twitching as John groaned against him and speared into Sherlock with his strong tongue. At last Sherlock could no longer resist delivering some fraction of the pleasure he was receiving, and arched forward, resettling them both so that they were both breath-held, open-throated, sucking and swallowing with mouths running wet.

John’s palms braced hard against Sherlock’s arse, shoving up and away, releasing and redirecting Sherlock’s aching cock to at last slip past John’s lips, across his tongue, against the back of his throat so he gagged and pushed Sherlock away and then started it all again. The throb of heat in Sherlock’s bollocks thrummed up his length, burst in his low belly, and John nursed the tip of his prick, suck-sipping and swallowing and growling pleasure through burbling lips.

Once Sherlock regained his senses—a difficult task as he was positively stupid with endorphins and felt as if his body was fire reduced to embers, still smouldering—he gripped John’s gorgeous thick cock in one hand and sank his mouth down on it, tease-sucking on each pull, twisting his neck to slide his tongue over as much of John’s skin as he could manage. John’s fingers digging into his thighs were a welcome irritation, and John’s own thighs began to shiver and didn’t stop until he’d shouted himself hoarse riding out his orgasm, Sherlock licking up the shaft of his cock so his spunk pumped out to ooze over Sherlock’s cheek and chin. Sherlock was grateful for the intimacy of it, and shuddered with orgasmic aftershock at the thrill of its filth.

Eventually they rearranged limbs and pillows and found each other’s sour mouths for deep, probing kisses. John held Sherlock by the jaw and wiped the cum from his face with a corner of the sheet, dirty-smiling and giving a wink that made Sherlock wrap arms around and pull him close, heaving out the final sigh of the night.

With nowhere else to be but there, in their own bed, in their own flat, knees touching and hands on each other’s naked torsos, Sherlock relished the luxury of being at home, in bed with his man. He hummed—sleepy—sated—and John rested a hand against the side of his throat, stroking his thumb over the bump of Sherlock’s adam’s apple.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and for all the kind and generous comments. I appreciate you more than I can say.
> 
> As of April 2019, this story will be on an indefinite hiatus. Subscribe above for notification of updates.

**Author's Note:**

> fuckyeahfightlock.tumblr.com
> 
> Subscribe above for weekly updates every Monday!


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